Control Engineering

Abstract

“Navigare necesse est”, i.e., the ship must be navigated, said the Romans in Antiquity. “Controlare necesse est”, i.e. systems must be controlled, we have been saying since the technological revolution of the nineteenth century. Really, in our everyday life, or in our environment, one can hardly find equipment that does not contain at least one or more control tasks solved by automation instead of by us, or, more importantly, for our comfort. In an iron, a temperature control system is operated by a relay, in a gas-heating system the temperature is also controlled, and in more sophisticated systems the temperature of the environment is also taken into consideration. In our homes, modern audio-visual systems contain dozens of control tasks, e.g., the regulation of the speed of the tape recorders, the start and stop operation of the equipment; similar operation modes of the CD and DVD systems; the temperature control of the processor in our PC, the positioning of the hard disks’ heads, etc. In cars, the quantity of petrol used and the harmonized operation of the brakes are all controlled by automatic controllers. An aircraft could not fly without controllers, since its operation is a typical example of an unstable system. The number of control tasks in modern aircraft is more than one hundred. The universe could not have been investigated by humankind without the automatic control and guidance systems used at launching rockets, satellites, and ballistic missiles. In the recent Mars explorers, sophisticated high-level, so-called intelligent components, have been employed. In complex, industrial processes the number of tasks to be solved is over a thousand or ten thousand. The quantity and quality of the products, as well as the safety of the environment, could not be guaranteed without these automatically operated systems. Launching products in the market requires the accurate control of a number of variables. In almost all assembly factories—from simple production beltways to robots— automatic control is applied.