ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an introduction to certain modern state-space control design methods. The specific methods presented are distinguished into two categories: the algebraic control methods and the observer design methods. Algebraic control refers to a particular category of modern control design problems wherein the controller has a prespecified structure. In this case, the design problem reduces to that of determining the controller parameters such that certain closed-loop requirements are met. State observers are used in order to produce a good estimate of the state vector. In designing a closed-loop system using modern control techniques, the control strategy applied is usually a feedback loop involving feedback of the system state vector. The main differences between the state and the output feedback methods are the following. The state feedback method has the advantage over the output feedback method in that it has greater degrees of freedom in the controller parameters.
