Customer Reviews

Robust Control Design with MATLAB® (Advanced Textbooks in Control and Signal Processing)

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This textbook embodies the essence of false advertisement. Although the authors claim to use the Robust Control Toolbox, they in fact are using the old (and obsolete) mu synthesis toolbox of yesteryear. I bought this book precisely because all my textbook use the old mu synthesis toolbox and I wanted a book to complement the Robust Control Toolbox demos in the mathworks website. Being that the actual theory is better developed in other textbooks and the examples presented in this book are very similar to those presented in other textbooks, I would not recommend this textbook to anyone.

I view this book as a good bridge between theory an application of Linear Robust control design. I see the authors as intentionally staying away from the bowels of the theory so as to not bog down the engineer who is looking to apply the techniques covered. Sometimes the depth of the theory involved dissuades the engineer from applying this powerful tool.

It's too bad that the book wasn't updated to coincide with the release of the Matlab RCT v3. However, every example in the book still works as all of the legacy commands that they are written with are still supported in RCT v3. In fact, it was an excellent exercise for me to convert the examples for use with the new RCT v3 syntax. Running the same examples with the old and new versions of the toolbox provided valuable insight, and was an excellent learning experience.

This book tries to advertise using the latest Robust Control Toolbox version 3.0. But failed to mention any of the new tools that were developed in version 3.0, such as uncertainty modeling(ureal.m,..), new model reduction tools (reduce.m,..), new loopshaping tools (loopsyn.m,..). The book tries to balance the theory and applications. But failed to illustrate either of them. The theory portion (Part I) has no examples. Actually, it tries to fool the consumers that this is a modern, up-to-date book, but in fact it's not. It only uses the old verion 2 tools. It just dropped a few theories from nowhere with minimum explanation. The references for the theory/algorithms are incomplete. For example the reference for BST model reduction method coded in the toolbox is missing. It also missed the essense of how and why we use Robust Control Theory, the spirit of using H-infinity as a MIMO loopshaping tool and mu-analysis as a multivariable robustness analysis tool. Part II design examples are not challenging enough. They are all easy to solve textbook problems. It did not point out the limitations and solutions of using the tools as an honest and knowledgeable author should do. The Robust Control Toolbox on-line demos even have more interesting and useful industrial design examples. For example, in the book, the spring-mass-damper problem was overly simplifed by attaching one end to the wall (no rigid-body dynamics considered). The hard disk drive problem has no flexible dynamics! It missed the essense of the non-colocated actuator/sensor design problem. The mu-analysis example did not illustrate how to pull out uncertainties from State-Space setup, which is the case for most control system design plants. It also failed to mention why we go from singular values to its lower bound (mu) in the theory part I of the book. It also failed to mention the role and importance of the mu-synthesis technique, and so on and so forth. The book material is too sloppily put together in a short time and out-of-date for a beginner who tries to learn the theory and the new version 3.0 Robust Control Toolbox tools (actually none of the new tools was introduced). It's too simple for an experience robust control designer who tries to advance himself for more chalenging design problems. The new Robust Control Toolbox manual has a lot more information on "Getting Start" and "New Version 3 Tools". This review was done by the Robust Control Toolbox (version 1~3) author.