Control engineering

Control engineering designs and implements systems that make dynamic processes follow desired behavior despite disturbances, uncertainty, and changing conditions.

Feedback control: A control strategy that measures a system's output and uses the difference from a target to adjust its input. It is the central strategy for correcting errors while a process runs.
Dynamical system: A system whose state changes over time according to internal rules and external inputs. Control engineering acts on systems whose behavior evolves rather than remaining static.
Industrial automation: The use of control systems and information technologies to operate industrial processes with reduced human intervention. It is a major setting for regulating production lines and continuous processes.
Open-loop control: A control strategy that sets inputs without using measurements of the resulting output. Unlike feedback control, it cannot correct deviations detected after an action.
Centrifugal governor: A mechanical device that regulates engine speed by adjusting a valve as rotational speed changes. Its feedback mechanism made steam-engine speed regulation a landmark control problem.
Closed-loop control system: A system that uses measured output to adjust its input through feedback. It shows how sensors, a controller, and a process form a working control loop.
System identification: The process of constructing a mathematical model of a system from observed input and output data. It supplies models when first-principles equations are incomplete or unavailable.
Robotics: The engineering field concerned with designing, building, and operating programmable machines that interact with the physical world. Robots depend on control to coordinate motion and respond to sensed conditions.
Feedforward control: A control strategy that adjusts inputs using measured disturbances or known changes before they affect the output. It can act before an error appears, unlike purely feedback-based correction.
James Clerk Maxwell: A Scottish physicist and mathematician whose work included a mathematical analysis of governors. His 1868 paper helped establish mathematical methods for assessing regulator stability.

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