Comprising six invited lectures by recognised experts in the field of control the Colloquium on Automatic Control presents a number of well-balanced theoretical and engineering-oriented elements which will be accessible to many readers ranging from non-specialists to experts and professionals in the field.

Addressing the difficult problem of controlling flexible spacecraft having multiple articulated appendages is the aim of this volume. Such systems are needed for space mission concepts including multi-payload space platforms and autonomous space-based manipulators. These systems are characterised by highly nonlinear dynamics, flexibility in members and joints, low inherent damping, and modeling uncertainty. A complete nonlinear rotational dynamic model of a generic multibody flexible system is derived, and is shown to possess certain passivity properties. The main result is a class of...

The monograph is addressed to researchers in the field of geometric theory of infinite dimensional systems. The author uses basic concepts of the infinite dimensional system theory, approximate controllability, initial observability, which are covered in the second and third chapter. The book is self-contained with respect to the notions of the geometric theory, although sometimes the author refers to the references for the finite dimensional case.

This book reports on the new results in Abstract Systems Theory (AST). It shows the progress made so far in the effort launched in 1960 to develop a mathematical theory of systems based on the "top-down"-formalization-approach. The volume can be used as a supplementary reading in courses in systems theory and engineering. The material is organized in such a way that portions of the book relevant for the supplementary reading in different courses can be used independently from the rest of the text.

This book merges two major areas of control: the design of control systems and adaptive control. Original contributions are made in the polynomial approach to stochastic optimal control and the resulting control laws are then manipulated into a form suitable for application in the self-tuning control framework. A major contribution is the derivation of both scalar and multivariable optimal controllers for the rejection of measurable disturbances using feedforward. A powerful feature of the book is the presentation of a case-study in which the LQG self-tuner was tested on the pressure control...

This book is devoted to Large Scale Systems methodologies including decomposition, aggregation, and model reduction techniques. The focus is put on theoretical and practical results resulting from the application of these techniques in the area of stability and decentralized control. Every result is illustrated by examples to facilitate understanding. The appendices provide a collection of ready-to-use packages implementing some algorithms included in the book. Graduate students concerned with system and control theory will be interested in this book, since it offers a global synthesis on the...

This conference on nonlinear control theory was organized within a special "Nonlinear Year" of the French "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique". This volume is a collection of invited papers giving an overview of new trends in research all over the world. It was the aim of the editors to bring together theoretical contributions by pure mathematicians and more applied communications dedicated to robotics, electrical engines, biology and computer science.

This monograph considers the integration of knowledge-based soft control with hard control algorithms. As a specific application, the development of a knowledge-based controller for robotic manipulators is addressed. Servo control alone is known to be inadequate for nonlinear and high-speed processes including robots. Furthermore, knowledge-based control such as fuzzy control, when directly included in the servo loop, has produced insatisfactory performance in research robots. These considerations, along with the fact that human experts can very effectively perform tuning functions in process...

The main objective of this monograph is to develop efficient techniques for tackling the control problems of partially-known dynamical systems. This broad class of systems has a fundamental feature: Knowledge of the dynamic characteristics of the control plant is not complete. In one category, the missing knowledge is due to the unmodeled high-frequency parasitics (adaptive systems). In another category, some of the model parameters are unknown-but-bounded (uncertain systems). The book concentrates on reduced-order adaptive control schemes and deterministic stabilizing control methodologies....

The present proceedings volume is devoted to two subjects. Stabilization with emphasis on exact controllability: considering a physical system, such as a vibrating plate, one can reach a steady state in a finite time by acting on the boundary. Control of boundaries: given a physical system find the geometry of the domain (optimal shape) which minimizes a cost related to the solution of a boundary value problem in this domain, for example find a minimum drag profile. Many lectures included mathematical analysis as well as engineering applications and numerical simulation.