José Luis Guzmán – författare

Automatic Control with Interactive Tools is a textbook for undergraduate study of automatic control. Providing a clear course structure, and covering concepts taught in engineering degrees, this book is an ideal companion to those studying or teaching automatic control. The authors have used this text successfully to teach their students.

By providing unique interactive tools, which have been designed to illustrate the most important automatic control concepts, Automatic Control with Interactive Tools helps students overcome the potential barriers presented by the significant mathematical content of automatic control courses. Even when they have previously had only the benefit of an introductory control course, the software tools presented will help readers to get to grips with the use of such techniques as differential equations, linear algebra, and differential geometry.

While there are thousands of books written about feedback control, it is surprising that this is the very first book about feedforward control. Feedforward control is a very powerful technique to compensate for measurable load disturbances in regulation control problems, and the use of feedforward control to assist the traditional feedback controllers is rapidly increasing in industry. The main goal of this book is to describe the power of feedforward control and to present different tuning rules for these controllers. To achieve this goal, theoretical and practical contributions are presented throughout the book to make the technique understandable and easy to implement. The book contains many practical aspects, both in terms of tuning and implementation of the feedforward controller. Many simulation examples are also provided, as well as a presentation of industrial experiences obtained from feedforward control applied to temperature control in greenhouses. For these reasons, we believe that the book will be useful not only at various levels in the teaching systems, but also for engineers working in industry.

While there are thousands of books written about feedback control, it is surprising that this is the very first book about feedforward control. Feedforward control is a very powerful technique to compensate for measurable load disturbances in regulation control problems, and the use of feedforward control to assist the traditional feedback controllers is rapidly increasing in industry. The main goal of this book is to describe the power of feedforward control and to present different tuning rules for these controllers. To achieve this goal, theoretical and practical contributions are presented throughout the book to make the technique understandable and easy to implement. The book contains many practical aspects, both in terms of tuning and implementation of the feedforward controller. Many simulation examples are also provided, as well as a presentation of industrial experiences obtained from feedforward control applied to temperature control in greenhouses. For these reasons, we believe that the book will be useful not only at various levels in the teaching systems, but also for engineers working in industry.

This monograph is framed within the context of off-road mobile robotics. In particular, it discusses issues related to modelling, localization, and motion control of tracked mobile robots working in planar slippery conditions. Tracked locomotion constitutes a well-known solution for mobile platforms operating over diverse challenging terrains, for that reason, tracked robotics constitutes an important research field with many applications (e.g. agriculture, mining, search and rescue operations, military activities). The specific topics of this monograph are: historical perspective of tracked vehicles and tracked robots; trajectory-tracking model taking into account slip effect; visual-odometry-based localization strategies; and advanced slip-compensation motion controllers ensuring efficient real-time execution. Physical experiments with a real tracked robot are presented showing the better performance of the suggested novel approaches to known techniques.

 Keywords: longitudinal slip, visual odometry, slip-compensation control, robust predictive control, trajectory tracking.

 Related subjects: Robotics – Mechanical Engineering – Mechanics – Computer Science – Artificial Intelligence - Applications

A discussion of challenges related to the modeling and control of greenhouse crop growth, this book presents state-of-the-art answers to those challenges. The authors model the subsystems involved in successful greenhouse control using different techniques and show how the models obtained can be exploited for simulation or control design; they suggest ideas for the development of physical and/or black-box models for this purpose.

Strategies for the control of climate- and irrigation-related variables are brought forward. The uses of PID control and feedforward compensators, both widely used in commercial tools, are summarized. The benefits of advanced control techniques—event-based, robust, and predictive control, for example—are used to improve on the performance of those basic methods.

A hierarchical control architecture is developed governed by a high-level multiobjective optimization approach rather than traditional constrained optimization and artificial intelligence techniques.  Reference trajectories are found for diurnal and nocturnal temperatures (climate-related setpoints) and electrical conductivity (fertirrigation-related setpoints). The objectives are to maximize profit, fruit quality, and water-use efficiency, these being encouraged by current international rules. Illustrative practical results selected from those obtained in an industrial greenhouse during the last eight years are shown and described. The text of the book is complemented by the use of illustrations, tables and real examples which are helpful in understanding the material.

Modeling and Control of Greenhouse Crop Growth will be of interest to industrial engineers, academic researchers and graduates from agricultural, chemical, and process-control backgrounds.