Software-Enabled Control - by Tariq Samad & Gary Balas Hardcover

Book Synopsis

• Discusses open systems, object orientation, software agents, domain-specific languages, component architectures, as well as the dramatic IT-enabled improvements in memory, communication, and processing resources that are now available for sophisticated control algorithms to exploit.
• Useful for practitioners and researchers in the fields of real-time systems, aerospace engineering, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence.

From the Back Cover

The first comprehensive resource on software and computing innovations in control technology

New developments in software and information technology are reinvigorating the control engineering community, raising expectations of dramatic improvements in the performance, safety, design time, and verification and validation of control systems. In concert with these developments, synergies between computer science and control are enabling futuristic innovations in autonomous, embedded, and adaptive systems, uninhabited air vehicles and robots.

Software-Enabled Control: Information Technology for Dynamical Systems offers a clear and thorough presentation of computer-enabled developments in control engineering as they relate to autonomous vehicle applications. The contributions range over software architectures, online modeling and control, and hybrid dynamical systems.

Some of the novel topics covered in this volume include:

• Open-system platforms that greatly simplify the real-time implementation of complex algorithms
• Control middleware for exploiting the capabilities afforded by the advances in computing technologies
• New algorithms and implementations of model-predictive control and state and model estimation
• Syntheses of intelligent control methodologies with modern control science, within software-enabled frameworks
• Tools and algorithms for hybrid dynamics, integrating the discrete event and continuous time aspects that have traditionally been considered separately
• Safety-assured control design for single and multiple vehicles
• Architectures and strategies for failure detection, fault tolerance, and control reconfiguration

Unique in its focus and broad in scope, Software-Enabled Control: Information Technology for Dynamical Systems offers an important resource for researchers and practitioners who are exploring the frontiers of control engineering, as well as for graduate and undergraduate students seeking entrance into this exciting and visionary community.

Review Quotes

"...a serious and detailed look at much exciting and ambitious work...gives an excellent look at what will soon become possible - and probably commonplace - in advanced control systems." (Measurement & Control)

"...an invaluable resource for research scientists, practicing engineers...graduate and undergraduate students...academic, corporate, and main libraries cannot afford to be without a copy of this outstanding publication.... Essential." (Choice, Vol. 41, No. 3, November 2003)

About the Author

TARIQ SAMAD is Corporate Fellow at Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. A graduate of Yale University, Dr. Samad received his MSEE and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. His other edited publications include Perspectives in Control Engineering: Applications, Technology, New Developments and Automation, Control, and Complexity: An Integrated View, both available from Wiley/IEEE.

GARY BALAS is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics and Co-Director of the Control Science and Dynamical Systems Center, both at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Balas is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine and received his PhD degree in Astronautics and Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He is coauthor of the MATLAB? m-Analysis and Synthesis Toolbox and president of MUSYN Inc. Dr. Balas's accomplishments include the Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME.