This compact and original reference and textbook presents the most important classical and modern essentials of control engineering in a single volume. It constitutes a harmonic mixture of control theory and applications, which makes the book especially useful for students, practicing engineers and researchers interested in modeling and control of processes. Well written and easily understandable, it includes a range of methods for the analysis and design of control systems.

Except from the Foreword
The stated aim of the book series "Capturing Intelligence" is to publish books on research from all disciplines dealing with and affecting the issue of understanding and reproducing intelligence artificial systems. Of course, much of the work done in the past decades in this area has been of a highly technical nature, varying from hardware design for robots, software design for intelligent agents, and formal logic for reasoning.
It is therefore very refreshing to see Information Flow and Knowledge Sharing. This is a courageous book indeed. It is not afraid to tackle the Big Issues: notions such as information, knowledge, information system, information flow, collaborative problem solving, and ontological reasoning. All of these notions are crucial to our understanding of intelligence and our building of intelligent artificial systems, but all too often, these Big Issues are hidden behind the curtains while the technical topics take center stage.
AI has a rich history of philosophical books that have chosen a non-standard structure and narrative. It is nice to see that the authors have succeeded into combining a non-standard approach to deep questions with a non-standard format, resulting in a highly interesting volume.
"Frank van Harmelen, Series Editor"
Excerpt from the Introduction
Our interest is to promote, through a better and deeper understanding of the notions of information and knowledge, a better and deeper critical understanding of information technology as situated in the full range of human activities, assuming as a principle that this range of activities cannot be properly appreciated when it is reduced to the simplifiedmeans-end schema proposed by Technology. We invite the reader to build his/her own points of view about these notions, considering our propositions as a starting point for a critical analysis and discussion of these points. With that, we believe we are contributing to a better understanding of the impact of technology - and particularly of Information Technology - in everyday life.
"Flavio Soares Correa da Silva, Jaume Agusti-Cullell"
*Bridges the gap between the technological and philosophical aspects of information technology
*Gives both professionals and academics a philosophical foundation of IT so they can better understand their own discliplines
*Sheds light on a part of IT which is often overshadowed by its technical counterparts

Electroactive polymers (EAPs) respond to electrical stimulation with large deformations. They are dynamic actuators which have attracted attention from an interdisciplinary audience of engineers and scientists. An enabling EAP technology is emerging which attempts to imitate the properties of natural muscle and which, as a result, can perform a unique function in a variety of biologically-inspired robotics applications.

Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications covers the fundamental properties, modelling and demonstration of EAPs in robotic applications, focusing particularly on artificial muscles and sensors. Ionic Polymera "Metal Composite Actuators and Dielectric Elastomers are discussed within the book with chapters on their properties and their uses in robotics applications.

With its concentration on devices based on EAPs and their uses, Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications will be of interest to researchers working within this field as well as to postgraduate students studying robotics or smart materials and structures. Practitioners working in the mechanical, electrical and materials industries will also find this book of value.

A complete reference to adaptive control of systems with nonsmooth industrial nonlinearities such as:- backlash- dead-zones- component failure- friction- hysteresis- saturation- time delays. These nonlinearities in industrial actuators cause severe problems in the motion control of industrial processes, particularly in view of modern requirements of speed and precision of movement such as occur in semiconductor manufacturing, precision machining, and elsewhere. Actuator nonlinearities are ubiquitous in engineering practice and limit control system performance. While standard feedback control alone cannot handle these nonsmooth nonlinearities effectively, this book, with unified and systematic adaptive design methods developed in 16 chapters, shows how such nonlinear characteristics can be effectively compensated for by using adaptive and intelligent control techniques. This allows desired system performance to be achieved in the presence of uncertain nonlinearities. With extensive surveys of literature and comprehensive summaries of various design methods, the authors of the book chapters, who are experts in their areas of interest, present new solutions to some important issues in adaptive control of systems with various sorts of nonsmooth nonlinearities.In addition to providing solutions, the book is also aimed at motivating more research activities in the important field of adaptive control of nonsmooth nonlinear industrial systems by formulating several challenging open problems in related areas.

DARS is now a well-established conference that gathers every two years the main researchers in Distributed Robotics systems. Even if the field is growing, it has been maintained a one-track conference in order to enforce effective exchanges between the main researchers in the field. It now a well-established tradition to publish the main contributions as a book from Springer. There are already 5 books entitled "Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems" 1 to 5.

Recently, there has been considerable research interest in neural network control of robots, and satisfactory results have been obtained in solving some of the special issues associated with the problems of robot control in an "on-and-off" fashion. This book is dedicated to issues on adaptive control of robots based on neural networks. The text has been carefully tailored to (i) give a comprehensive study of robot dynamics, (ii) present structured network models for robots, and (iii) provide systematic approaches for neural network based adaptive controller design for rigid robots, flexible joint robots, and robots in constraint motion. Rigorous proof of the stability properties of adaptive neural network controllers is provided. Simulation examples are also presented to verify the effectiveness of the controllers, and practical implementation issues associated with the controllers are also discussed.

This book gives an account of an ellipsoidal calculus and ellipsoidal techniques developed by the authors. The text ranges from a specially developed theory of exact set-valued solutions to the description of ellipsoidal calculus, related ellipsoidal-based methods and examples worked out with computer graphics.

This edited volume contains sixteen research articles and presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. It assembles experts from the fields of operations research, control theory and optimization, stochastic analysis, and financial engineering to review and substantially update the recent progress in these fields. Another distinct characteristic of the book is that all papers are motivated by applications in which optimization, control, and stochastics are inseparable. The book will be a timely addition to the literature and will be of interest to people working in the aforementioned fields.

Most importantly, this volume is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday. In view of his fundamental contributions, his distinguished career, his substantial achievements, his influence on the areas of control theory and applications, operations research, and management science, and his dedication to the scientific community, a number of leading experts in the fields of optimization, control, and operation management, have contributed to this volume in honor of him.

The new technological advances opened widely the application field of robots. Robots are moving from the classical application scenario with structured industrial environments and tedious repetitive tasks to new application environments that require more interaction with the humans. It is in this context that the concept of Wearable Robots (WRs) has emerged. One of the most exciting and challenging aspects in the design of biomechatronics wearable robots is that the human takes a place in the design, this fact imposes several restrictions and requirements in the design of this sort of devices. The key distinctive aspect in wearable robots is their intrinsic dual cognitive and physical interaction with humans. The key role of a robot in a physical human robot interaction (pHRI) is the generation of supplementary forces to empower and overcome human physical limits. The crucial role of a cognitive human robot interaction (cHRI) is to make the human aware of the possibilities of the robot while allowing them to maintain control of the robot at all times. This book gives a general overview of the robotics exoskeletons and introduces the reader to this robotic field. Moreover, it describes the development of an upper limb exoskeleton for tremor suppression in order to illustrate the influence of a specific application in the designs decisions."

Increasing demands on the output performance, exhaust emissions, and fuel consumption necessitate the development of a new generation of automotive engine functionality. This monograph is written by a long year developmental automotive engineer and offers a wide coverage of automotive engine control and estimation problems and its solutions. It addresses idle speed control, cylinder flow estimation, engine torque and friction estimation, engine misfire and CAM profile switching diagnostics, as well as engine knock detection. The book provides a wide and well structured collection of tools and new techniques useful for automotive engine control and estimation problems such as input estimation, composite adaptation, threshold detection adaptation, real-time algorithms, as well as the very important statistical techniques. It demonstrates the statistical detection of engine problems such as misfire or knock events and how it can be used to build a new generation of robust engine functionality. This book will be useful for practising automotive engineers, black belts working in the automotive industry as well as for lecturers and students since it provides a wide coverage of engine control and estimation problems, detailed and well structured descriptions of useful techniques in automotive applications and future trends and challenges in engine functionality.

The two volumes contain the Proceedings of the 5th IFAC DYCOPS Symposium that took place in Corfu, Greece between June 8-10, 1998. The Symposium was a continuation of the very successful series that used to be called DYCORD+, the last of which (DYCORD+ '95) took place in Denmark in 1995. It was sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Chemical Process Control.
The Symposium embraced the topic of Integration of Design and Control that had previously occurred as a separate IFAC workshop. The theme of "Technology Push vs. Technology Pull in the 21st Century" aimed to bring together researchers and developers of new methodologies (Technology Push) as well as users of these methodologies (Technology Pull).
The major areas of interest were organized in the following categories: i) Reacting Process Systems, ii) Separation Process Systems, iii) Batch Process Systems, iv) Complex and Industrial Process Systems, and v) Interaction of Design and Control.

This book gives an exposition of the exciting field of control of oscillatory and chaotic systems, which has numerous potential applications in mechanics, laser and chemical technologies, communications, biology and medicine, economics, ecology, etc.A novelty of the book is its systematic application of modern nonlinear and adaptive control theory to the new class of problems. The proposed control design methods are based on the concepts of Lyapunov functions, Poincare maps, speed-gradient and gradient algorithms. The conditions which ensure such control goals as an excitation or suppression of oscillations, synchronization and transformation from chaotic mode to the periodic one or vice versa, are established. The performance and robustness of control systems under disturbances and uncertainties are evaluated.The described methods and algorithms are illustrated by a number of examples, including classical models of oscillatory and chaotic systems: coupled pendula, brusselator, Lorenz, Van der Pol, Duffing, Henon and Chua systems. Practical examples from different fields of science and technology such as communications, growth of thin films, synchronization of chaotic generators based on tunnel diods, stabilization of swings in power systems, increasing predictability of business-cycles are also presented.The book includes many results on nonlinear and adaptive control published previously in Russian and therefore were not known to the West.Researchers, teachers and graduate students in the fields of electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, economics will find this book most useful. Applied mathematicians and control engineers from various fields of technology dealing with complex oscillatory systems will also benefit from it.

Microsystems are an important success factor in the automobile industry. In order to fulfil the customers' requests for safety convenience and vehicle economy, and to satisfy environmental requirements, microsystems are becoming indispensable. Thus a large number of microsystem applications came into the discussion. With the international conference AMAA 2000, VDI/VDE-IT provides a platform for the discussion of all MST relevant components for automotive applications. The conference proceedings gather the papers by authors from automobile suppliers and manufacturers.

In the mathematical treatment of many problems which arise in physics, economics, engineering, management, etc., the researcher frequently faces two major difficulties: infinite dimensionality and randomness of the evolution process. Infinite dimensionality occurs when the evolution in time of a process is accompanied by a space-like dependence; for example, spatial distribution of the temperature for a heat-conductor, spatial dependence of the time-varying displacement of a membrane subject to external forces, etc. Randomness is intrinsic to the mathematical formulation of many phenomena, such as fluctuation in the stock market, or noise in communication networks. Control theory of distributed parameter systems and stochastic systems focuses on physical phenomena which are governed by partial differential equations, delay-differential equations, integral differential equations, etc., and stochastic differential equations of various types. This has been a fertile field of research with over 40 years of history, which continues to be very active under the thrust of new emerging applications. Among the subjects covered are: Control of distributed parameter systems; Stochastic control; Applications in finance/insurance/manufacturing; Adapted control; Numerical approximation . It is essential reading for applied mathematicians, control theorists, economic/financial analysts and engineers.

This book is the fourth volume of the sub series of the Lecture Notes in Mobility dedicated to Road Vehicle Automation. lts chapters have been written by researchers, engineers and analysts from all around the globe. Topics covered include public sector activities, human factors and challenges, ethical, legal, energy and technology perspectives, vehicle systems development, as well as transportation infrastructure and planning. The book is based on the Automated Vehicles Symposium which took place in San Francisco, California (USA) in July 2016.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing and maturing interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, network science, control theory, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. This volume of proceedings includes 31 original contributions presented at the 2012 International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2012) held in November 2012 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD USA. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into five parts, representative of critical long-term and emerging research thrusts in the multi-robot community: Coordination for Perception, Coverage, and Tracking; Task Allocation and Coordination Strategies; Modular Robots and Novel Mechanisms and Sensors; Formation Control and Planning for Robot Teams; and Learning, Adaptation, and Cognition for Robot Teams.

The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

The IFAC Workshop on Intelligent Components for Vehicles (ICV'98) was held in Seville (Spain), on March 23-24 1998. The event follows the Workshop on Intelligent Components for Autonomous and Semiautonomous Vehicles (ICASAV'95) held in Toulouse (France, October 1995).

The main objective of ICV'98 was to bring together specialists on components and instruments for automotive systems, mobile robots and vehicles in general to enhance the value of their experience in both hardware and software intelligent components.

Future vehicles will deal more and more with autonomous functions to improve safety and traffic management and to reduce consumption and pollution. Numerous on-board decision systems will replace the driver in critical running phases. The problems and solutions experienced, by adopting this new technology, will bring out many common points with other transportation systems and mobile robots.

Research and Developments on Mobile Robotics have produced many components for perception, control and planning that can be used in vehicles for collision detection and avoidance, position estimation, guidance and manoeuvering aids for drivers, advanced teleoperation, and other applications.

The topics of the Workshop are in an emerging field in which the research is quickly being converted into industrial products. Several applications in the automotive domain, marine vehicles, agricultural and others were included in the program.

In addition to the presentation of the papers, ICV also included a plenary talk and a round table about intelligent components for future vehicles with the participation of several industrial companies.

The book largely represents the extended version of select papers from the Inter- tional Conference on Intelligent Unmanned System ICIUS 2007 which was jointly organized by the Center for Unmanned System Studies at Institut Teknologi Bandung, Artificial Muscle Research Center at Konkuk University and Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astrona- ics. The joint-event was the 3rd conference extending from International Conference on Emerging System Technology (ICEST) in 2005 and International Conference on Technology Fusion (ICTF) in 2006 both conducted in Seoul. ICIUS 2007 was focused on both theory and application primarily covering the topics on robotics, autonomous vehicles and intelligent unmanned technologies. The conference was arranged into three parallel symposia with the following scope of topics: Unmanned Systems: Micro air vehicle, Underwater vehicle, Micro-satellite, - manned aerial vehicle, Multi-agent systems, Autonomous ground vehicle, Blimp, Swarm intelligence, learning and control Robotics and Biomimetics: Artificial muscle actuators, Smart sensors, Design and applications of MEMS/NEMS system, Intelligent robot system, Evolutionary al- rithm, Control of biological systems, AI and expert systems, Biological learning control systems, Neural networks, Genetic algorithm Control and Intelligent System: Distributed intelligence, Distributed/decentralized intelligent control, Distributed or decentralized control methods, Distributed and - bedded systems, Embedded intelligent control, Complex systems, Discrete event s- tems, Hybrid systems, Networked control systems, Delay systems, Fuzzy systems, Identification and estimation, Nonlinear systems, Precision motion control, Control applications, Control engineering education.

To describe the true behavior of most real-world systems with sufficient accuracy, engineers have to overcome difficulties arising from their lack of knowledge about certain parts of a process or from the impossibility of characterizing it with absolute certainty. Depending on the application at hand, uncertainties in modeling and measurements can be represented in different ways. For example, bounded uncertainties can be described by intervals, affine forms or general polynomial enclosures such as Taylor models, whereas stochastic uncertainties can be characterized in the form of a distribution described, for example, by the mean value, the standard deviation and higher-order moments.

The goal of this Special Volume on "Modeling, Design, and Simulation of Systems with Uncertainties" is to cover modern methods for dealing with the challenges presented by imprecise or unavailable information. All contributions tackle the topic from the point of view of control, state and parameter estimation, optimization and simulation.

Thematically, this volume can be divided into two parts. In the first we present works highlighting the theoretic background and current research on algorithmic approaches in the field of uncertainty handling, together with their reliable software implementation. The second part is concerned with real-life application scenarios from various areas including but not limited to mechatronics, robotics, and biomedical engineering.

This book introduces physical effects and fundamentals of piezoelectric sensors and actuators. It gives a comprehensive overview of piezoelectric materials such as quartz crystals and polycrystalline ceramic materials. Different modeling approaches and methods to precisely predict the behavior of piezoelectric devices are described. Furthermore, a simulation-based approach is detailed which enables the reliable characterization of sensor and actuator materials. One focus of the book lies on piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers. An optical approach is presented that allows the quantitative determination of the resulting sound fields. The book also deals with various applications of piezoelectric sensors and actuators. In particular, the studied application areas are * process measurement technology, * ultrasonic imaging, * piezoelectric positioning systems and * piezoelectric motors. The book addresses students, academic as well as industrial reseachers and development engineers who are concerned with piezoelectric sensors and actuators.

This book is an up-to-date self-contained compendium of the research carried out by the authors on model-based diagnosis of a class of discrete-event systems called active systems. After defining the diagnosis problem, the book copes with a variety of reasoning mechanisms that generate the diagnosis, possibly within a monitoring setting. The book is structured into twelve chapters, each of which has its own introduction and concludes with bibliographic notes and itemized summaries. Concepts and techniques are presented with the help of numerous examples, figures, and tables, and when appropriate these concepts are formalized into propositions and theorems, while detailed algorithms are expressed in pseudocode. This work is primarily intended for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in the fields of artificial intelligence and control theory.

Legged robots are a promising locomotion system, capable of performing tasks that conventional vehicles cannot. Even more exciting is the fact that this is a rapidly developing field of study for researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, only a few books have been published on the subject of multi-legged robots. The main objective of this book is to describe some of the major control issues concerning walking robots that the authors have faced over the past 10 years. A second objective is to focus especially on very large hydraulically driven hexapod robot locomotion weighing more than 2,000 kg, making this the first specialized book on this topic. The 10 chapters of the book touch on diverse relevant topics such as design aspects, implementation issues, modeling for control, navigation and control, force and impedance control-based walking, fully autonomous walking, walking and working tasks of hexapod robots, and the future of walking robots. The construction machines of the future will very likely resemble hydraulically driven hexapod robots like the ones described in this book - no longer science fiction but now a reality.

This book provides basic theories and implementations using SCILAB open-source software for digital images. The book simplifies image processing theories and well as implementation of image processing algorithms, making it accessible to those with basic knowledge of image processing. This book includes many SCILAB programs at the end of each theory, which help in understanding concepts. The book includes more than sixty SCILAB programs of the image processing theory. In the appendix, readers will find a deeper glimpse into the research areas in the image processing.

The design of nonlinear controllers for mechanical systems has been an ex tremely active area of research in the last two decades. From a theoretical point of view, this attention can be attributed to their interesting dynamic behavior, which makes them suitable benchmarks for nonlinear control the oreticians. On the other hand, recent technological advances have produced many real-world engineering applications that require the automatic con trol of mechanical systems. the mechanism for de Often, Lyapunov-based techniques are utilized as veloping different nonlinear control structures for mechanical systems. The allure of the Lyapunov-based framework for mechanical system control de sign can most likely be assigned to the fact that Lyapunov function candi dates can often be crafted from physical insight into the mechanics of the system. That is, despite the nonlinearities, couplings, and/or the flexible effects associated with the system, Lyapunov-based techniques can often be used to analyze the stability of the closed-loop system by using an energy like function as the Lyapunov function candidate. In practice, the design procedure often tends to be an iterative process that results in the death of many trees. That is, the controller and energy-like function are often constructed in concert to foster an advantageous stability property and/or robustness property. Fortunately, over the last 15 years, many system the ory and control researchers have labored in this area to produce various design tools that can be applied in a variety of situations."