ABSTRACT
The purpose of control is to make a plant (i.e., the “mechatronic” system to be controlled) behave in a desired manner, according to some performance specifi cations. The overall system that includes at least the plant and the controller is called the control system. The control problem can become challenging due to such reasons as
Complex system (many inputs and many outputs, dynamic coupling, • nonlinearities, etc.) Rigorous performance speci cations• Unknown excitations (unknown inputs/disturbances/noise)• Unknown dynamics (incompletely known plant)•
A good control system should satisfy performance requirements concerning such attributes as accuracy, stability, speed of response or bandwidth, sensitivity, and robustness. This chapter will introduce the subject of control systems, which is necessary for the eld of mechatronics. It is advised to study the concepts of transfer functions and block diagrams as presented in Chapter 3 before proceeding further. MATLAB® and LabVIEW® software tools that are useful in the study and implementation of control systems are outlined in Appendix D.
