Following his book on the origin of control engineering (1800-1930) the author now traces development through the critical period 1930-1955, widely identified as the period of 'classical' control theory. In the 1930s basic automatic control devices were developed and used in process industries, as were servos for the control of aircraft and ships and amplifiers for the telephone system and early computers etc.

This book is about prediction and control of processes which can be expressed by discrete-time models (i.e. the characteristics vary in some way with time). The aim of the book is to provide a unified and comprehensive coverage of the principles, perspectives and methods of adaptive prediction, which is used by scientists and researchers in a wide variety of disciplines.

This book provides a unified, practically-oriented treatment to many constrained control paradigms. Recently proposed control strategies are unified in a generalised framework to deal with different kinds of constraints. The book's solutions are based on reference conditioning ideas implemented by means of supervisory loops, and they are complementary to any other control technique used for the main control loop. Although design simplicity is a book priority, the use of well established sliding mode concepts for theoretical analysis make it also rigorous and self-contained. The first part of the book focuses on providing a simple description of the method to deal with system constraints in SISO systems. It also illustrates the design and implementation of the developed techniques through several case studies. The second part is devoted to multivariable constrained control problems: improving system decoupling under different plant or controller constraints, and reducing the undesired effects caused by manual-automatic or controller switching. The key aim of this book is to reduce the gap between the available constrained control literature and industrial applications.

This book has been inspired by the portfolio of recent scientific outputs from a range of European and national research initiatives in cognitive science. It presents an overview of recent developments in cognition research and unites the various emerging research strands within a single text as a reference point for progress in the subject. It also provides guidance for new researchers on the breadth of the field and the interconnections between the various research strands identified here. Advances in Cognitive Systems brings together a wide range of material from leading workers in the field as well as the outputs from research groups around the world, covering the two principal cognition paradigms of cognitivism and emergence. Furthermore, it suggests some interesting lines of thought about the challenges and opportunities for future work in the field and for promoting the various research agendas highlighted within. This compilation will be of interest not only to those working in the fields of computer science and AI but also to psychologists, neural scientists, researchers in information science, and engineers involved in the development of advanced robotics, mechatronic systems and HCI systems.

Fractional control techniques provide an effective way to control dynamic behaviours, using fractional differential equations. This can include the control of fractional plants, the control of a plant using a fractional controller, or the control of a plant so that the controlled system will have a fractional behaviour to achieve a performance that would otherwise be hard to come by. An Introduction to Fractional Control outlines the theory, techniques and applications of fractional control. After an initial introduction to fractional calculus, the book explores many fractional control systems including fractional lead control, fractional lag control, first, second and third generation Crone control, fractional PID, PI and PD control, fractional sliding mode control, logarithmic phase Crone control, fractional reset control, fractional H₂ and H_∞ control, fractional predictive control, and fractional time-varying control. Each chapter contains solved examples and references for further reading. Common definitions and proofs are included, along with a discussion of how MATLAB can be used to assist in the design and implementation of fractional control. This book is an essential guide for researchers and advanced students of control engineering in academia and industry.