ABSTRACT
This chapter is to outline several of the prominent techniques of control, both modern and classical, and indicate drawbacks of methods which make "soft" intelligent control more appropriate in applications. Simple, linear servo control is known to be inadequate for transient and high-speed operation of complex plants. An adaptive control system is a feedback control system in which the values of some or all of the controller parameters are modified during the system operation on the basis of some performance measure, when the response requirements are not satisfied. Sliding mode control may be treated as an adaptive control technique. Because the switching surface is not fixed, its variability is somewhat analogous to an adaptation criterion. H-Infinity control is a relatively new optimal control approach which is quite different from the Linear Quadratic Gaussian method.
