The Art of Controller Design

Experience can mould control engineering knowledge into a formidable design skill to produce practical controllers for industrial applications. This book deals with a hands-on project that aims to control the altitude of a simulated helicopter that is to hover a fixed distance above the deck of a ship, even when it is heaving in an ocean swell. Though relatively simple, the project contains many features of large industrial applications such as dealing with incomplete specifications, acquiring relevant expertise along the way through experimentation that is guided by pertinent theoretical methods, and converging to a very good non-trivial design. Through this exposure to a realistic control project the iterative and flexible nature of engineering design becomes clear. Along the way the subtle differences between fundamental theory and its practical application are encountered, showing that design problems are addressed by a mixture of common sense and relevant engineering knowledge.