Manufacturing Systems Control Design details a matrix-based approach to the real-time application of control in discrete-event systems and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) in particular. The "and/or" algebra in which matrix operations are carried out enables fast and efficient calculations with a minimum of computing power. In addition, the method uses standard task-sequencing and resource-requirements matrices which, if not in use already, can be easily derived with the help of this text. Matrix-based techniques are compared with Petri net and max-plus algebra ideas.

Virtual modeling of complex physical systems has brought a new perspective to the investigation of phenomena in FMS. The software discussed in this book(and downloadable from the authorsa (TM) website at http: //flrcg.rasip.fer.hr/) supplies the reader with a graphical user interface that can do many things to make the design and control of FMS easier.

The examples presented herein tackle the real-world problems faced by engineers trying to put into practice methods developed in academia, bringing together catholic experience of sensors, control systems, robotics, industrial automation, simulation, agile assembly and supply chains. Common concerns confronted include:

a [ predictability: issues of control system modeling and analysis are addressed;

a [ producibility: by looking at the design and synthesis of cellular workcells;

a [ productivity: in terms of dynamic sensing and control.

Covering all the steps from identification of operations and resources through modeling of the system and simulation of its dynamics in a virtual environment to the transformation of those models into real-worldalgorithms, this monograph is a sound practical basis for the design of controllers for manufacturing systems. It will interest both the academic and practising control or manufacturing engineer wishing to enhance the control of flexible systems and operations researchers looking at manufacturing performance. The end-of-chapter exercises provided and the easy-to-read introduction to the subject will also suit the final-year undergraduate and the beginning graduate in these disciplines.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 5.5 International Precision Assembly Seminar, IPAS 2012, held in Chamonix, France, in February 2012. The 15 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: micro processes and systems; handling and manipulation in assembly; tolerance management and error compensation methods; metrology and quality control; intelligent control of assembly systems; and process selection and modelling techniques.

This book provides an in-depth understanding of precise and approximate MMC modeling and calculation techniques of engineering systems. The in-depth analysis demonstrates that it is only possible to precisely model and calculate the dependability of systems including s-dependent components with the knowledge of their (total) universe spaces, represented here by Markov spaces. They provide the basis for developing and verifying approximate MMC models. With the mathematical steps described and applied to several examples throughout this text, interested system developers and users can perform dependability analyses themselves. All examples are structured in precisely the same way.

An aerial robot is a system capable of sustained flight with no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. A lighter than air robot is an aerial robot that relies on the static lift to balance its own weight. It can also be defined as a lighter than air unmanned aerial vehicle or an unmanned airship with sufficient autonomy. Lighter than air systems are particularly appealing since the energy to keep them airborne is small. They are increasingly considered for various tasks such as monitoring, surveillance, advertising, freight carrier, transportation.

This book familiarizes readers with a hierarchical decoupled planning and control strategy that has been proven efficient through research. It is made up of a hierarchy of modules with well defined functions operating at a variety of rates, linked together from top to bottom. The outer loop, closed periodically, consists of a discrete search that produces a set of waypoints leading to the goal while avoiding obstacles and weighed regions. The second level smoothes this set so that the generated paths are feasible given the vehicle's velocity and accelerations limits. The third level generates flyable, timed trajectories and the last one is the tracking controller that attempts to minimize the error between the robot measured trajectory and the reference trajectory.

This hierarchy is reflected in thestructure and contentof the book. Topics treated are: Modelling, Flight Planning, Trajectory Design and Control. Finally, some actual projects are described in the appendix. This volume will prove useful for researchers and practitioners working in Robotics and Automation, Aerospace Technology, Control and Artificial Intelligence.

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Our intention in preparing this book was to present in as simple a manner as possible those branches of error analysis which ?nd direct applications in solving various problems in engineering practice. The main reason for writing this text was the lack of such an approach in existing books dealing with the error calculus. Most of books are devoted to mathematical statistics and to probability theory. The range of applications is usually limited to the problems of general statistics and to the analysis of errors in various measuring techniques. Much less attention is paid in these books to two-dimensional and three-dim- sional distributions, and almost no attention is given to problems connected with the two-dimensional and three-dimensional vectorial functions of independent random variables. The theory of such vectorial functions ?nds new applications connected, for example, with analysis of the positioning accuracy of various mechanisms, among them of robot manipulators and automatically controlled earth-moving and loading machines, such as excavators.

Rapid developments in electronics over the past two decades have induced a move from purely mechanical vehicles to mechatronics design. Recent advances in computing, sensors, and information technology are pushing mobile equipment design to incorporate higher levels of automation under the novel concept of intelligent vehicles. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles introduces this concept, and provides an overview of recent applications and future approaches within this field. Several case studies present real examples of vehicles designed to navigate in off-road environments typically encountered by agriculture, forestry, and construction machines. The examples analyzed describe and illustrate key features for agricultural robotics, such as automatic steering, safeguarding, mapping, and precision agriculture applications. The eight chapters include numerous figures, each designed to improve the reader's comprehension of subjects such as: * automatic steering systems; * navigation systems; * vehicle architecture; * image processing and vision; and * three-dimensional perception and localization. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles will be of great interest to professional engineers and researchers in vehicle automation, robotics, and the application of artificial intelligence to mobile equipment; as well as to graduate students of mechanical, electrical, and agricultural engineering.

The principal chapters of this book form a collection of technical articles sp- ning many areas of research in robotics, these are followed by a set of short r- iniscences and tributes written by former students of Professor George A. Bekey. Professor Bekey, a pioneer in robotics, retired from the University of Southern C- ifornia (USC) in 2002 after serving on its faculty for forty years. He maintains an association with USC as University Professor Emeritus. Professor Bekey turned 80 in June 2008 - this is his Festschrift. As one of Professor Bekey's former students, it has been my privilege to know him for many years. This book represents the collective warm feelings of his former students, who remember their association with him in the fondest terms. Part I of this book is composed of technical chapters representing threads of active robotics research knitted loosely together. In many cases the themes of the chapters have their origins in the work the authors did when they were graduate students with Professor Bekey. These chapters are written for the reader interested in a sampling of modern research in Autonomous Robots. It is my hope that, for the serious reader, these chapters will serve as invitations to explore the ?eld via further reading and research.

"Modeling, Control and Coordination of Helicopter Systems" provides a comprehensive treatment of helicopter systems, ranging from related nonlinear flight dynamic modeling and stability analysis to advanced control design for single helicopter systems, and also covers issues related to the coordination and formation control of multiple helicopter systems to achieve high performance tasks. Ensuring stability in helicopter flight is a challenging problem for nonlinear control design and development. This book is a valuable reference on modeling, control and coordination of helicopter systems, providing readers with practical solutions for the problems that still plague helicopter system design and implementation. Readers will gain a complete picture of helicopters at the systems level, as well as a better understanding of the technical intricacies involved.

This book presents the synthesis and analysis of fuzzy controllers and its application to a class of mechanical systems. It mainly focuses on the use of type-2 fuzzy controllers to account for disturbances known as hard or nonsmooth nonlinearities. The book, which summarizes the authors' research on type-2 fuzzy logic and control of mechanical systems, presents models, simulation and experiments towards the control of servomotors with dead-zone and Coulomb friction, and the control of both wheeled mobile robots and a biped robot. Closed-loop systems are analyzed in the framework of smooth and nonsmooth Lyapunov functions.

The theory of linear functional observers, which is the subject of this book, is increasingly becoming a popular researched topic because of the many advantages it presents in state observation and control system design. This book presents recent information on the current state of the art research in this field. This book will serve as a useful reference to researchers in this area of research to understand the fundamental concepts relevant to the theory of functional observers and to gather most recent advancements in the field. This book is useful to academics and postgraduate students researching into the theory of linear functional observers. This book can also be useful for specialized final year undergraduate courses in control systems engineering and applied mathematics with a research focus.

Autonomy for Marine Robots provides a timely and insightful overview of intelligent autonomy in marine robots. A brief history of this emerging field is provided, along with a discussion of the challenges unique to the underwater environment and their impact on the level of intelligent autonomy required. Topics covered at length examine advanced frameworks, path-planning, fault tolerance, machine learning, and cooperation as relevant to marine robots that need intelligent autonomy.

In this book for the first time two scientific fields - consensus formation and synchronization of communications - are presented together and examined through their interrelational aspects, of rapidly growing importance. Both fields have indeed attracted enormous research interest especially in relation to complex networks.
In networks of dynamic systems (or agents), consensus means to reach an agreement regarding a certain quantity of interest that depends on the state of all dynamical systems (agents). Consensus problems have a long history in control theory and computer sciences, and form the foundation of the field of distributed computing. Synchronization, which defines correlated-in-time behavior between different processes and roots going back to Huygens to the least, is now a highly popular, exciting and rapidly developing topic, with applications ranging from biological networks to mathematical epidemiology, and from processing information in the brain to engineering of communications devices.
The book reviews recent finding in both fields and describes novel approaches to consensus formation, where consensus is realized as an instance of the nonlinear dynamics paradigm of chaos synchronization. The chapters are written by world-known experts in both fields and cover topics ranging from fundaments to various applications of consensus and synchronization."

Recent years have seen a rapid development of neural network control tech niques and their successful applications. Numerous simulation studies and actual industrial implementations show that artificial neural network is a good candidate for function approximation and control system design in solving the control problems of complex nonlinear systems in the presence of different kinds of uncertainties. Many control approaches/methods, reporting inventions and control applications within the fields of adaptive control, neural control and fuzzy systems, have been published in various books, journals and conference proceedings. In spite of these remarkable advances in neural control field, due to the complexity of nonlinear systems, the present research on adaptive neural control is still focused on the development of fundamental methodologies. From a theoretical viewpoint, there is, in general, lack of a firmly mathematical basis in stability, robustness, and performance analysis of neural network adaptive control systems. This book is motivated by the need for systematic design approaches for stable adaptive control using approximation-based techniques. The main objec tives of the book are to develop stable adaptive neural control strategies, and to perform transient performance analysis of the resulted neural control systems analytically. Other linear-in-the-parameter function approximators can replace the linear-in-the-parameter neural networks in the controllers presented in the book without any difficulty, which include polynomials, splines, fuzzy systems, wavelet networks, among others. Stability is one of the most important issues being concerned if an adaptive neural network controller is to be used in practical applications."

This book provides an overview of power electronic converters for numerical simulations based on DIgSILENT PowerFactory. It covers the working principles, key assumptions and implementation of models of different types of these power systems. The book is divided into three main parts: the first discusses high-voltage direct currents, while the second part examines distribution systems and micro-grids. Lastly, the third addresses the equipment and technologies used in modelling and simulation. Each chapter includes practical examples and exercises, and the accompanying software illustrates essential models, principles and performance using DIgSILENT PowerFactory. Exploring various current topics in the field of modelling power systems, this book will appeal to a variety of readers, ranging from students to practitioners.

This monograph presents a novel concept of a mobile robot, which is a single-wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot. The robot is balanced by a spinning wheel attached through a two-link manipulator at the wheel bearing, and actuated by a drive motor. This configuration conveys significant advantages including insensitivity to attitude disturbances, high maneuverability, low rolling resistance, ability to recover from falls, and amphibious capability for potential applications on both land and water. This book focuses on the dynamics and control aspects, including modeling, model-based control, learning-based control, and shared control with human operators. This novel mobile robot concept opens up the science of dynamically stable systems with a single wheel configuration. The book also presents considerations in concept, design implementations, and kinematics modeling, as well as experimental results from various algorithms and cases. The system is a nonholonomic, underactuated, and highly nonlinear system, so this book is appropriate for scientists and engineers with interests in mobile robot, dynamics and control, as a research reference and postgraduate textbook.

This unified volume is a collection of invited articles on topics presented at the Symposium on Systems, Control, and Networks, held in Berkeley June 5-7, 2005, in honor of Pravin Varaiya on his 65th birthday. Varaiya is an eminent faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley, widely known for his seminal contributions in areas as diverse as stochastic systems, nonlinear and hybrid systems, distributed systems, communication networks, transportation systems, power networks, economics, optimization, and systems education.The chapters include recent results and surveys by leading experts on topics that reflect many of the research and teaching interests of Varaiya, including: hybrid systems and applications - communication, wireless and sensor networks - transportation systems - stochastic systems - systems education Advances in Systems, Control, and Networks will serve as an excellent resource for practicing and research engineers, applied mathematicians, and graduate students working in such areas as communication networks, sensor networks, transportation systems, control theory, hybrid systems, and applications. Contributors: J.S. Baras, V.S. Borkar, M.H.A. Davis, A. Hwang, T. Jiang, R. Johari, A. Kotsialos, A.B. Kurzhanski, E.A. Lee, X. Liu, H.S. Mahmassani, D. Manjunath, B. Mishra, L. Munoz, M. Papageorgiou, C. Piazza, S.E. Shladover, D.M. Stipanovic, T.M. Stoenescu, X. Sun, D. Teneketzis, C.J. Tomlin, J.N. Tsitsiklis, J. Walrand, X. Zhou

This book describes methods for adaptive control of distributed-collector solar fields: plants that collect solar energy and deliver it in thermal form. Controller design methods are presented that can overcome difficulties found in these type of plants: they are distributed-parameter systems, i.e., systems with dynamics that depend on space as well as time;their dynamics is nonlinear, with a bilinear structure;there is a significant level of uncertainty in plant knowledge.

Adaptive methods form the focus of the text because of the degree of uncertainty in the knowledge of plant dynamics. Parts of the text are devoted to design methods that assume only a very limited knowledge about the plant. Other parts detail methods that rely on knowledge of the dominant plant structure. These methods are more plant specific, but allow the improvement of performance.

"Adaptive Control of Solar Energy Collector Systems" demonstrates the dynamics of solar fields to be rich enough to present a challenge to the control designer while, at the same time, simple enough to allow analytic work to be done, providing case studies on dynamics and nonlinear control design in a simple and revealing, but nontrivial way.

The control approaches treated in this monograph can be generalized to apply to other plants modelled by hyperbolic partial differential equations, especially process plants in which transport phenomena occur, plants like dryers, steam super-heaters and even highway traffic.

An important example, used repeatedly throughout the text, is a distributed-collector solar field installed at Plataforma Solar de Almeria, located in southern Spain. The control algorithms laid out in the text are illustrated with experimental results generated from this plant.

Although the primary focus of this monograph is solar energy collector, the range of other systems which can benefit from the methods described will make it of interest to control engineers working in many industries as well as to academic control researchers interested in adaptive control and its applications.

This book presents a survey of past and recent developments on human walking in virtual environments with an emphasis on human self-motion perception, the multisensory nature of experiences of walking, conceptual design approaches, current technologies, and applications. The use of Virtual Reality and movement simulation systems is becoming increasingly popular and more accessible to a wide variety of research fields and applications. While, in the past, simulation technologies have focused on developing realistic, interactive visual environments, it is becoming increasingly obvious that our everyday interactions are highly multisensory. Therefore, investigators are beginning to understand the critical importance of developing and validating locomotor interfaces that can allow for realistic, natural behaviours. The book aims to present an overview of what is currently understood about human perception and performance when moving in virtual environments and to situate it relative to the broader scientific and engineering literature on human locomotion and locomotion interfaces. The contents include scientific background and recent empirical findings related to biomechanics, self-motion perception, and physical interactions. The book also discusses conceptual approaches to multimodal sensing, display systems, and interaction for walking in real and virtual environments. Finally, it will present current and emerging applications in areas such as gait and posture rehabilitation, gaming, sports, and architectural design.

Available for the first time in English, this two-volume course on theoretical and applied mechanics has been honed over decades by leading scientists and teachers, and is a primary teaching resource for engineering and maths students at St. Petersburg University. The course addresses classical branches of theoretical mechanics (Vol. 1), along with a wide range of advanced topics, special problems and applications (Vol. 2). Among the special applications addressed in this second volume are: stability of motion, nonlinear oscillations, dynamics and statics of the Stewart platform, mechanics under random forces, elements of control theory, relations between nonholonomic mechanics and the control theory, vibration and autobalancing of rotor systems, physical theory of impact, statics and dynamics of a thin rod. This textbook is aimed at students in mathematics and mechanics and at post-graduates and researchers in analytical mechanics.

"AutomaticControl of Atmospheric and Space Flight Vehicles" is perhaps the firstbook on the market to present a unified and straightforwardstudyof the design and analysis of automatic control systems for both atmospheric and space flight vehicles.Covering basic control theory and design concepts, it is meantas a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate students in moderncourses on flight control systems.

In addition to the basics of flight control, this book covers a number ofupper-level topicsand will therefore be of interest not only to advanced students, but also toresearchers and practitioners in aeronautical engineering, applied mathematics, and systems/control theory."

This volume is an outgrowth of the workshop Applications of Advanced Control Theory to Robotics and Automation, organized in honor of the 70th birthdays of Petar V. Kokotovic and Salvatore Nicosia. Both Petar and Turi have carried out distinguished work in the control community, and have long been recognized as mentors as well as experts and pioneers in the field of automatic control, covering many topics in control theory and several different applications. The variety of their research is reflected in this book, which includes contributions ranging from mathematics to laboratory experiments.Main topics covered include: * Observer design for time-delay systems, nonlinear systems, and identification for different classes of systems* Lyapunov tools for linear differential inclusions, control of constrained systems, and finite-time stability concepts * New studies of robot manipulators, parameter identification, and different control problems for mobile robots* Applications of modern control techniques to port-controlled Hamiltonian systems, different classes of vehicles, and web handling systems* Applications of the max-plus algebra to system-order reduction; optimal machine schedu used by many of the authors will make this book suitable for experts, as well as young researchers who seek a more intuitive understanding of these relevant topics in the field

This book provides a conceptual and computational framework to study how the nervous system exploits the anatomical properties of limbs to produce mechanical function. The study of the neural control of limbs has historically emphasized the use of optimization to find solutions to the muscle redundancy problem. That is, how does the nervous system select a specific muscle coordination pattern when the many muscles of a limb allow for multiple solutions? I revisit this problem from the emerging perspective of neuromechanics that emphasizes finding and implementing families of feasible solutions, instead of a single and unique optimal solution. Those families of feasible solutions emerge naturally from the interactions among the feasible neural commands, anatomy of the limb, and constraints of the task. Such alternative perspective to the neural control of limb function is not only biologically plausible, but sheds light on the most central tenets and debates in the fields of neural control, robotics, rehabilitation, and brain-body co-evolutionary adaptations. This perspective developed from courses I taught to engineers and life scientists at Cornell University and the University of Southern California, and is made possible by combining fundamental concepts from mechanics, anatomy, mathematics, robotics and neuroscience with advances in the field of computational geometry. Fundamentals of Neuromechanics is intended for neuroscientists, roboticists, engineers, physicians, evolutionary biologists, athletes, and physical and occupational therapists seeking to advance their understanding of neuromechanics. Therefore, the tone is decidedly pedagogical, engaging, integrative, and practical to make it accessible to people coming from a broad spectrum of disciplines. I attempt to tread the line between making the mathematical exposition accessible to life scientists, and convey the wonder and complexity of neuroscience to engineers and computational scientists. While no one approach can hope to definitively resolve the important questions in these related fields, I hope to provide you with the fundamental background and tools to allow you to contribute to the emerging field of neuromechanics.

Dry Clutch Control for Automated Manual Transmission Vehiclesanalyses the control of a part of the powertrain which has a key role in ride comfort during standing-start and gear-shifting manoeuvres. The mechanical conception of the various elements in the driveline has long since been optimised so this book takes a more holistic system-oriented view of the problem featuring: a comprehensive description of the driveline elements and their operation paying particular attention to the clutch, a nonlinear model of the driveline for simulation and a simplified model for control design, with a standing-start driver automaton for closed loop simulation, a detailed analysis of the engagement operation and the related comfort criteria, different control schemes aiming at meeting these criteria, friction coefficient and unknown input clutch torque observers, practical implementation issues and solutions based on experience of implementing optimal engagement strategies on two Renault prototypes.

This book provides a rigorous framework in which to study problems in the analysis, stability and design of networked control systems. Four dominant sources of difficulty are considered: packet dropouts, communication bandwidth constraints, parametric uncertainty, and time delays. Past methods and results are reviewed from a contemporary perspective, present trends are examined, and future possibilities proposed. Emphasis is placed on robust and reliable design methods. New control strategies for improving the efficiency of sensor data processing and reducing associated time delay are presented. The coverage provided features: * an overall assessment of recent and current fault-tolerant control algorithms; * treatment of several issues arising at the junction of control and communications; * key concepts followed by their proofs and efficient computational methods for their implementation; and * simulation examples (including TrueTime simulations) to provide hands-on experience. In addition to the theoretical coverage, the author describes a number of applications that demonstrate the real-world relevance of this material, and these include: * a servo system; * a triple inverted pendulum; * power system control; * wireless control of a cart with inverted pendulum and wireless servo application with emphasis on controller area networks; and * switched ethernet and wireless area networks. Researchers and graduate students working in networked and distributed control will find this text a useful guide in avoiding and ameliorating common and serious problems with these systems. The increasing prevalence of networks in many fields of engineering will make Control and Estimation Methods over Communication Networks of interest to practitioners with backgrounds in communications, process engineering, robotics, power, automotive and other areas.

This constitutes the Proceedings of the 22nd IFIP TC7 Conference held in July 2005, in Torino, Italy, and dedicated to Camillo Possio, on the 60th anniversary of his death during the last air raid over Torino. The papers in this volume concern primarily stochastic and distributed systems, their control/optimization, and inverse problems. These proceedings also explore applications of optimization techniques and computational methods in fields such as medicine, biology and economics.