Historical Preview to Control Systems
Automatic control has played a vital role in the advance of engineering and science. In addition to its extreme importance in space vehicle systems leading to the iconic space race and a subsequent accuracy in spacecraft control features, missile guidance systems, robotic systems and the like, automatic control has become an integral to modern manufacturing and industrial processes. Notable controlling techniques were developed around the times of world wars. Before that, controlling flight time of manned air crafts was deemed a commendable feat. Continuous, reliable control of the airplane was necessary for flights lasting longer than a few seconds. Credits to the Wright brothers, and possibly, Da Vinci. During the war, more sophisticated techniques for automatic control of airplanes were developed. This delved into the electronic, and several other aspects of flight patterns. Naval aspects were also explored. The atomic race resulted in controlled fuel usage to harness energy, and also other destructive purposes.
18th century: James Watt’s centrifugal governor for the speed control of a steam engine.
1922: Minorsky’s work on automatic controls for steering ships. He showed how stability could be determined from the differential equations describing the system.
1932: Nyquist developed a procedure to determine the stability of closed loop systems based on open loop response to steady-state sinusoidal inputs.
1940s: Development of frequency response methods which resulted in the design of linear closed loop control systems that satisfied performance requirements. The development of the root locus method also happened in the early 1950s.
1960–1980: Improvements in optimal control of deterministic and stochastic systems.
1980 and onwards: Development of modern control theory centered around robust control, H∞ control and associated topics.
Advanced control theory has led to the development of self-driving cars, automatic drones, accurate trading models and so on. In the future, instead of looking to control theory as a kinetic modelling technique, the aim is to broaden it to a wider horizon of a regulator interacting with a series of tasks meant to have a final goal, and a part of a machine responsible for certain action.
