Customer Reviews

Optimal Control, 2nd Edition

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I had the pleasure of having taken my control courses at Georgia Tech while the author, Frank Lewis was a professor there. He was probably one of the best professors in this area amongst a stellar group of control professors. He explanations and presentation of the topics were concise, clear, and extremely applicable. These same traits are present in this book. One of the main knocks against control theorists is that they tend to refrain from using real world examples to illustrate their point. Dr. Lewis is quite the opposite, he believes that the real world problem is key to understanding the theory and he is never shy in using those examples. The number of examples may be a problem here, afterall, students live and die by the worked problem to get to understanding.

This book is an excellent introductory guide to the fascinating world of optimal controls.

This is the first book on optimal control I've read, so I can't compare it to others. The writing is dry (just like any textbook). But there are a lot of good examples, especially the Matlab examples. There is also the level of mathematical rigor that you'd hope to see in any controls text. One thing I think it lacks is an appendix with a short review of linear systems theory; I have to keep referring back to my linear systems book for important formulas.

Horrible typos, I found 4 on 1 page alone. Example 9.4.2 has an entry missing out of the A matrix.

The authors do a nice job of deriving the basic equations of optimal control. However, the examples are lacking. Also, they do not present an organized approach to solving optimal control problems.