Vishnusankar Seenivasan

Village Swaraj

Southern Economist

Trends in Control

This book contains the text of the plenary lectures and the mini-courses of the European Control Conference (ECC 95) held in Rome, Italy, September 5-September 8, 1995. In particular, the book includes nine essays in which a selected number of prominent authorities present their views on some of the most recent developments in the theory and practice of control systems design and three self-contained sets of lecture notes. Some of the essays are focused on the topic of robust control. The article by J. Ackermann describes how to robustly control the rotational motions of a vehicle, to the purpose of simplifying the driver's task. The contribution by H. K wakernaak presents a detailed discussion of the requirements that performance and robustness impose on control systems design and of the symmetric roles of sensitivity and complementary sensitivity functions. The article by P. Boulet, B. A. Francis, P. C . Hughes and T. Hong describes an experimental testbed facility, called Daisy, whose dynamics emulate those of a real large flexible space structure and whose purpose is to test advanced identification and control design methods. The article of K. Glover discusses recent advances in uncertain system modeling, analysis and design, with ref erence to a flight control case study that has been test flown. The other essays describe advances in fundamental problems of control theory. The article by V. A. Yakubovich is a survey of certain new infinite horizon linear-quadratic optimization problems. The contribution by A. S.