《The Fundamentals of Control Theory》读书笔记

• Overview

  As an engineer, it is crucial that you are able to describe your system in an efficient and useful manner.
  

• Definations

• The best reason to learn control theory

  The best reason to learn control theory is that it is the glue that combines all other engineering fields and by understanding the fundamentals of control theory it opens the door for you to understand all of those other fileds at a more basic level.

• Control System Theory

  The Control System Theory is building models of your system and simulating it to make predictions, it’s understanding the dynamics and how they interact with the rest of the system, it’s filtering out noise and rejecting outside disturbances, it’s designing or selecting proper sensors and actuators, and it’s testing your system to ensure it’ll perform as expected in an unexpected environment.

• System

  A system is a collection of interconnected parts that form a larger more complex whole.

• Control system

  A control system is a mechanism that alters the behavior (or the future state) of a system.

• The Three Different Problems

  1. The system identification problem

     Determining the mathematical model of your system is done through a process called system identification. There are two ways: black box method, white box method;

  2. The simulation problem

     The simulation problem is predicting how your outputs change given a known set of inputs and the mathematical model of the system.

  3. The control problem

     How do we generate the appropriate system input that will produce the desired output.

• Concepts

  The actuators are driven by an actuating signal that is generated by the controller.

• Process

  We’ll refer to the system that is being controlled as the process.

• Actuator

  An actuator is a generic term that refers to a device or motor that is responsible for controlling a system.

• Plant

  It can be useful to refer to the collection of both process and actuators as a single system that we’ll call the plant.

• Open-loop

  This type of control system is referred to as open-loop since the inputs into the controller are not fed back from the output of the process.

• Closed-loop

  The beauty of the feedback control system - or a closed-loop control system is that it is able to react to changes to the controlled variable automatically by constantly driving the error term to zero.

• Timer vs. Clock

  A timer is a device for measuring how much time has elapsed over some interval, whereas a clock’s measurement is related back to the time of day.

• Float regulator

  

• Mathematically descripition

  English	中文
  $2^{nd}orderordinarydifferentialequation$	二阶常微分方程

Each representation has its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

• Transfer function

  Loosely speaking, transfer functions are a Laplace domain representation of your system and they are commonly associated with the era of control techniques labeled classical control theory;

  A Transfer Function is the Laplace transform of the impluse response of a linear, time-invariant system with a single input and single output when you set the initial conditions to zero. They allow us to connect several systems in series by performing convolution through simple multiplication.

  

  • LTI system

    All LTI systems have the following properties:

    1. homegeneity,

       Homogeneity means that if you scale the input, $x(t)$, by factor, $a$, then the output, $y(t)$, will also be scaled by $a$;

    2. superposition,

       Superposition (or additivity) means that if you sum two separate inputs together, the response through a linear system will be the summed outputs of each individual input;

       A system is defined as a linear system if it has the two properties homogeneity and superposition.

       1 & 2 is the first part of an LTI system, which is Linearity

    3. time-invariance

       Time-invariance(or translation invariance, which covers translation through space as well as time), refers to a system behaving the same regardless of when in time the action takes place;

       $y(t-T)=h(x(t-T))$

• State space representation

  State space is a time domain representation, packaged in matrix form, and they are commonly associated with the era labeled modern control theory;

• Linear system vs. Linear equation

  Linear system, is a mapping between two vector spaces that obeys the properties of homogeneity and superposition;

  Linear equation, is an algebraic expression where every term is a single, first-power variable multiplied by a constant;

  A well-known example of a linear equation is the equation of a line in a two-dimensional plane: $y=mx+b$ which is not homogenous $2(mx+b)\ne m(2x)+b$

• LTI systems vs. Non-LTI systems

  Linear systems are important because we can solve them — Richard Feynman

  You can create a linear model from a non-linear equation through a process called linearization which is a skill.

• Impulse Function

  The resulting output of a system that is subjected to an impulse function is called the impulse response of the system;

  The impulse function(or Dirac Delta function) is a signal that is infinitesimally short in time but has infinite magnitude;

  The impulse function is defined such that the integral of the function is one;

• Convolution Integral

  The convolution integral is a mathematical operation that you perform on two functions - we’ll call them $f(t)$ and $g(t)$ - and it is written in shorthand notation as an asterisk or a star.

There are really only three parts to the equation:

1. you reverse the input function $g(t)$ and shift through all of time
2. you multiply the reversed and shifted $g(t)$ by $f(t)$
3. you sum the product over all of time

• Frequncy Domain, Fourier transform

  Fourier transform map a signal from the time domain to the frequncy domain and back again;

  Convolution theorem states that the Fourier transform of convolution is just the multiplication of the individual Fourier transforms;

  Laplace transform decomposes a time domain signal into both cosines and exponential functions;

  $s$ domain

• Block diagrams

  Block diagrams show us the interrelationship of systems and how signals flow between them.

• References

1. The Fundamentals of Control Theory (Revison 1.6), Brian Douglas