Modern control systems / Richard C. Dorf

Includes index.

1. Introduction to control systems -- 2. Mathematical models of systems -- 3. Feed back control system characteristics -- 4. The performance of feedback control systems -- 5. The stability of linear feedback systems -- 6. The root locus method -- 7. Frequency response methods -- 8. Stability in the frequency domain -- 9. Time-domain analysis of control systems -- 10. The design and compensation of feedback control -- 11. Robust control systems -- 12. Design case studies.

The National Academy of Engineering identified in 1990 the ten outstanding engineering achievements of the preceding twenty-five years. These feats included five accomplishments made possible by utilizing modern control engineering: the Apollo lunar landing, satellites, computer-aided manufacturing, computerized axial tomography, and the jumbo jet. Automation and robotics are critical ingredients in the world's efforts toward an improved standard of living for all. Automation, the automatic operation of processes, and robotics, which includes the manipulator, controller, and associated devices, are all critical to effective operation of our plants, factories, and institutions. The most important and productive approach to learning is for each of us to rediscover and recreate anew the answers and methods of the past. Thus the ideal is to present the student with a series of problems and questions and point to some of the answers that have been obtained over the past decades. The traditional method-to confront the student not with the problem but with the finished solution-is to deprive the student of all excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of humankind to a dusty heap of theorems.