Control Systems

This chapter sketches the typical development of control systems and refers the reader to classical books for more details on control system design. Historically, control design started in the continuous world: a system had to be controlled, and its dynamics was captured by the equations of physics, for example, using ordinary differential equations. Then, control theory provides means to build a controller: another system, used in combination with the system to be controlled, is able to move the system to the requested state. The chapter thus begins by presenting a typical process leading to the development of a controller in the aerospace domain. It then gives an idea of each step.