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PREFACE:

Preface

MODERN CONTROL SYSTEMS—THE BOOK

The Mars Pathfinder spacecraft was sent aloft aboard a Delta II expendable launch vehicle on December 4,1996 to begin a seven-month journey to the Red Planet. The Pathfinder mission, one of the first of the NASA Discovery-class missions, was the first mission to land on Mars since the successful Viking spacecraft over two decades ago. After traveling over 497,418,000 km, the spacecraft impacted the Martian surface on July 4,1997 with a velocity of about 18 m/s. Upon impact the spacecraft bounced up approximately 15 meters, then continued to bounce another 15 times and rolled to a stop about 1 km from the initial impact point. The landing site is known as the Sagan Memorial Station and is located in the Ares Vallis region at 19.33 N, 33.55 W. Pathfinder deployed the first-ever autonomous rover vehicle, known as the Sojourner, to explore the landing site area. The mobile Sojourner had a mass of 10.5 kilograms and was designed to roam in a 300-m² area for around 30 days. The 0.25-m² solar array provided 16 watt-hours of peak power and the primary battery provided about 150 watt-hours of power. The steering control of this vehicle had to be accurate and had to limit the power consumption. Control engineers play a critical role in the success of the planetary exploration program. The role of autonomous vehicle spacecraft control systems will continue to increase as flight computer hardware and operating systems improve. In fact, Pathfinder used a commercially produced, multitasking computer operating system hosted in a 32-bit radiation-hardened workstation with1-gigabyte storage, programmable in C. This is quite an advancement over the Apollo computers with a fixed (read-only) memory of 36,864 words (one word was 16 bits) together with an erasable memory of 2,048 words. The Apollo "programming language" was a pseudocode notation encoded and stored as a list of data words "interpreted" and translated into a sequence of subroutine links. Interesting real-world problems, such as planetary mobile rovers like Sojourner, are used as illustrative examples throughout the book. For example, a mobile rover design problem is discussed in the Design Example in Section 4.8.

Control engineering is an exciting and a challenging field. By its very nature, control engineering is a multidisciplinary subject, and it has taken its place as a core course in the engineering curriculum. It is reasonable to expect different approaches to mastering and practicing the art of control engineering. Since the subject has a strong mathematical foundation, one might approach it from a strictly theoretical point of view, emphasizing theorems and proofs. On the other hand, since the ultimate objective is to implement controllers in real systems, one might take an ad hoc approach relying only on intuition and hands-on experience when designing feedback control systems. Our approach is to present a control engineering methodology that, while based on mathematical fundamentals, stresses physical system modeling and practical control system designs with realistic system specifications.

We believe that the most important and productive approach to learning is for each of us to rediscover and recreate anew the answers and methods of the past. Thus the ideal is to present the student with a series of problems and questions and point to some of the answers that have been obtained over the past decades. The traditional method—to confront the student not with the problem but with the finished solution—is to deprive the student of all excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of humankind to a dusty heap of theorems. The issue, then, is to present some of the unanswered and important problems that we continue to confront, for it may be asserted that what we have truly learned and understood, we discovered ourselves.

The purpose of this book is to present the structure of feedback control theory and to provide a sequence of exciting discoveries as we proceed through the text and problems. If this book is able to assist the student in discovering feedback control system theory and practice, it will have succeeded.

THE AUDIENCE

This text is designed for an introductory undergraduate course in control systems for engineering students. There is very little demarcation between aerospace, chemical, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering in control system practice; therefore this text is written without any conscious bias toward one discipline. Thus it is hoped that this book will be equally useful for all engineering disciplines and, perhaps, will assist in illustrating the utility of control engineering. The numerous problems and examples represent all fields, and the examples of the sociological, biological, ecological, and economic control systems are intended to provide the reader with an awareness of the general applicability of control theory to many facets of life. We believe that exposing students of one discipline to examples and problems from other disciplines will provide them with the ability to see beyond their own field of study. Many students pursue careers in engineering fields other than their own. For example, many electrical and mechanical engineers find themselves in the aerospace industry working alongside aerospace engineers. We hope this introduction to control engineering will give students a broader understanding of control system design and analysis.

In its first eight editions, Modern Control Systems has been used in senior-level courses for engineering students at more than 400 colleges and universities. It also has been used in courses for engineering graduate students with no previous background in control engineering.

THE NINTH EDITION

A companion website has been developed for students and faculty using the ninth edition. The website contains practice exercises and exam problems, all the MATLAB m-files and Simulink simulations in the book, Laplace and z-transform tables, written materials on matrix algebra, complex numbers, and symbols, units, and conversion factors. An icon will appear in the book margin whenever there is additional related material on the website. Also, since the website provides a mechanism for continuously updating and adding control related materials of interest to students and professors, it is advisable to visit the website regularly during the semester or quarter when taking the course. The MCS website address is ...