《Editorial Special issue on recent advances in hybrid control theory and applications》.pdfVIP

Control Theory Tech, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 217, August 2014 Control Theory and Technology /journal/11768 DOI 10.1007/s11768-014-4000-1 Editorial Special issue on recent advances in hybrid control theory and applications The demands of a rapidly advancing technology for faster and more accurate controllers have always had a strong influence on the progress of automatic control theory. In recent years control problems have been arising with increasing frequency in widely different areas, which cannot be addressed using conventional control techniques. The principal reason for this is the fact that a highly competitive economy is forcing systems to operate in regimes where presence of large uncertainties as well as nonlinearities plays a major role. For instance, the design of unmanned aircraft, unmanned underwater vehicles, and automatic driving systems for automobiles are all typical examples of such difficult control problems. The large uncertainties concerning the plant may arise due to large external disturbances, large parameter variations because of faults in the system, or failure of some of the subsystems. In such cases, the controller has to determine the specific situation that exists at any instant, and take the appropriate control action. Accomplishing this rapidly, accurately, and in a stable fashion is the objective of control design. Broadly speaking, the above problem is still one of adaptive control in which, typically, controller parameters are adjusted on the basis of plant parameter estimates. However, if conventional adaptive control is used, experience ind