ACE ASSIGNMENT 2

HISTORY OF AUTOMATED CONTROL ENGINEERING

Automatic Control Engineering has been a predominant and prominent aspect of
science and engineering in the recent years. The current lifestyle with smarter innovations
and technological advancements vows a great deal to this very field of Control Engineering.
Though Control Engineering is a trending subject of interest for research and study in the
recent times, the roots of this field goes back to the times before Christ.
Automatic control, particularly the application of feedback, has been fundamental to
the development of automation. Its origins lie in the level control, water clocks, and
pneumatics/hydraulic of the ancient world. From the 17th century onwards, systems were
designed for temperature control, the mechanical control of mills, and the regulation of
steam engines. During the 19th century it became increasingly clear that feedback systems
were prone to instability. A stability criterion was derived independently towards the end of
the century by Routh in England and Hurwitz in Switzerland. The 19th century, too, saw the
development of servomechanisms, first for ship steering and later for stabilization and
autopilots. The invention of aircraft added (literally) a new dimension to the problem.
Minorskys theoretical analysis of ship control in the 1920s clarified the nature of three-term
control, also being used for process applications by the 1930s. Based on servo and
communications engineering developments of the 1930s, and driven by the need for highperformance gun control systems, the coherent body of theory known as classical control
emerged during and just after WWII in the US, UK and elsewhere, as did cybernetics ideas.
Meanwhile, an alternative approach to dynamic modelling had been developed in the USSR
based on the approaches of Poincar and Lyapunov.
Information was gradually disseminated, an state-space or modern control
techniques, fuelled by Cold War demands for missile control systems, rapidly developed in
both East and West. The immediate post-war period was marked by great claims for
automation, but also great fears, while the digital computer opened new possibilities for
automatic control.

History of Automatic Control

Ancient Greece
It was a preoccupation of the Greeks and Arabs (in the period between about 300 BC
and about 1200 AD) to keep accurate track of time. In about 270 BC the
Greek Ctesibius invented a float regulator for a water clock, a device not unlike the ball and
cock in a modern flush toilet. The invention of the mechanical clock in the 14th century
made the water clock and its feedback control system obsolete. The float regulator does not
appear again until its use in the Industrial Revolution.

Industrial Revolution in Europe

Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine in 1713, and this date marks the
accepted beginning of the Industrial Revolution; however, its roots can be traced back into
the 17th century. The introduction of prime movers, or self-driven machines advanced grain
mills, furnaces, boilers, and the steam engine created a new requirement for automatic
control systems including temperature regulators (invented in 1624 ), pressure
regulators (1681), float regulators (1700) and speed control devices. The design of feedback
control systems up through the Industrial Revolution was by trial-and-error, together with a
great deal of engineering intuition. Thus, it was more of an art than a science. In the mid19th century mathematics was first used to analyze the stability of feedback control
systems. Since mathematics is the formal language of automatic control theory, we could
call the period before this time the prehistory of control theory.
First and Second World Wars
The First and Second World Wars saw major advancements in the field of mass
communication and signal processing. Other key advances in automatic controls
include differential equations, stability theory and system theory (1938), frequency domain
analysis (1940), ship control (1950), and stochastic analysis (1941).
Space/computer age
With the advent of the space age in 1957, controls design, particularly in the United
States, turned away from the frequency-domain techniques of classical control theory and
backed into the differential equation techniques of the late 19th century, which were
couched in the time domain. The modern era saw time-domain design for nonlinear
systems(1961), navigation (1960), optimal control and estimation theory (1962), nonlinear
control theory (1969), digital control and filtering theory (1974), and the personal
computer(1983)

The history of automatic control divides conveniently into four main periods as follows:
Early Control: To 1900
The Pre-Classical Period: 1900-1940
The Classical Period: 1935-1960
Modern Control: Post-1955

Early control
The Greek invented the float regulator around 270 BC for a water clock. This regulator
would maintain the water level in a tank at a constant depth, which yielded a constant flow
of water through a tube that would fill a second tank at a constant rate. Therefore the level
of water in the second tank depended on the time elapsed. This was possible since as the

water level dropped, a float would gradually open a valve, which would in turn replenish the
reservoir--the simple mechanism that controls our flush toilets today!
Interestingly, not only did the ancient Greeks use the float regulator for accurate
timekeeping, but they also used it for the automatic dispensing of wine .Between 800 and
1200 AD, various Arab engineers also designed many systems that relied on the principle
of feedback control and introduced the concept of on/off control--a very simple but elegant
method of regulation .
New inventions and applications of old principles began to appear during the 18th centuryfor example, Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reamur (1683- 1757) proposed several automatic
devices for controlling the temperature of incubators. These were based on an invention of
Cornelius Drebbel (1572-1663). The temperature was measured by the expansion of a liquid
held in a vessel connected to U-tube containing mercury. A float in the mercury operated an
arm which, through a mechanical linkage, controlled the draft to a furnace and hence the
rate of combustion and heat output. Improved temperature control systems were devised
by Bonnemain (circa 1743- 1828), who based his sensor and actuator on the differential
expansion of different metals. The most significant control development during the 18th
century was the steam engine governor. The origins of this device lie in the lift-tender
mechanism which was used to control the gap between the grinding-stones in both wind
and water mills. Most of the inventions and applications of this period were concerned with
the basic activities of controlling temperatures, pressures, liquid levels, and the speed of
rotating machinery: the desire was for regulation and for stability. However, growth in the
size of ships and naval guns, and introduction of new weapons such as torpedoes, resulted
in the application of steam, hydraulic, and pneumatic power systems to operate position
control mechanisms.
The first of powered steering engine, designed by Frederick Sickels in the U.S. (patented
1853) was an open-loop system. The first closed-loop steering engine (patented 1866) was
designed by J. McFarlane Gray for BruneI's steamship the Great Eastern. In France, around
the same time, Jean Joseph Fareot designed a range of steering engines and other closedloop position control systems.

Pre Classical Period

The early years of the 20th century saw the rapid and widespread application of feedback
controllers for voltage, current, and frequency regulation; boiler control for steam
generation; electric motor speed control; ship and aircraft steering and auto stabilization:
and temperature, pressure, and flow control in the process industries. In the twenty years
between 1909 and 1929, sales of instruments grew rapidly.

As applications multiplied, engineers became puzzled and confused: controllers that worked
satisfactorily for one application, or for one set of conditions, were unsatisfactory when
applied to different systems or different conditions: problems arose when a change in one
part of the system (process, controller, measuring system, or actuator) resulted in a change
in the major time constant of that part. This frequently caused instability in what had
previously been, or seemed to have been, a stable system. In 1922, Nicholas Minorsky
(1885-1970) presented a clear analysis of the control involved in position control systems
and formulated a control law that we now refer to as three-term or PID control.

The Classical Period

During the period 1935-1940, advances in understanding of control system analysis and
design were made independently by several groups in several countries.
The advent of the Second World War concentrated control system work on a few specific
problems. The most important of these was the aiming of anti-aircraft guns. This is a
complex problem that involves the detection of the position of the airplane, calculation of
its future position, and the precise control of the movement of a heavy gun. The design of
an adequate servomechanism to control the gun position was a difficult task. It also became
clear during 1941 that the cumbersome system of relaying manually the information
obtained from radar devices to the gun controllers was not adequate to combat the threat
of fast aircraft and that there was a need to develop a system in which an automatic
tracking radar system was directly linked to the gun director, which was in turn linked to the
gun position controller.
The problems raised by anti-aircraft control were system design problems in that several
different units, often designed and manufactured by different groups, had to be integrated;
the overall performance was dependent not so much on the performance of the individual
units but on how well they worked together. Difficulties experienced in getting units to work
together led to a deeper understanding of bandwidth, noise, and non-linearities in systems.
By the end of the war the classical control techniques-with the exception of the root locus
design method of Walter Evans (1948, 1950)-had been established. The design
methodologies were for linear single-input systems-that is, systems that can be described by
linear differential equations with constant coefficient and that have a single control input.
The frequency response techniques, based on the use of Nyquist, Bode, Nichols, and Inverse
Nyquist charts, assessed performance in terms of bandwidth, resonance, and gain and
phase margins and provided a graphical, pictorial view of the system behaviour. The
alternative approach based on the solution of the differential equations using Laplace
transform techniques expressed performance in terms of rise time, percentage overshoot,
steady-state error, and damping.
The achievements of the classical era began to be consolidated and disseminated in books
published during the 1940s and early 1950s.

Modern Control
Between 1948 and 1952 Richard Bellman, working in the mathematics department of the
RAND Corporation, studied the problem of determining the allocation of missiles to targets
so as to inflict the maximum damage. This work led him to formulate the "principle of
optimality" and to dynamic programming. His insight was to SCC that by applying a
particular control policy the system would 22 reach a region in state-space and there would
be a specified amount of time left. Formulated in this way, the problem can be treated as a
multistage decision making process.
As well as involving positional accuracy, performance requirements also involve constraints
expressible as optimization requirements; for example, reaching a specified position in
minimum time or carrying out a set of manoeuvres with minimum fuel consumption.
Consequently, attention once again focused on the differential equation approach to the
analysis and design of control systems. Dynamical problems that involve minimizing or
maximizing some performance index have an obvious and strong analogy with the classical
variational formulations of analytical mechanics given by Lagrange and Hamilton.
The final triumph of time-response methods appeared to come when Kalman and Bucy
attacked the filtering problem. Their work, as well as producing the Kalman-Bucy filter,
demonstrated the basic role of feedback in filtering theory and the duality that existed
between the multivariable control problem and multivariable feedback filtering.
The design and implementation of practical systems were much more strongly influenced
through the replacement of electronic tubes by semiconductors such as diodes, transistors
and thyristors in the fifties and the replacement of mechanical and electrical components by
solid-state and micro electric devices.

As of today, Control Engineering is changing with new innovative advancements coming by

the day. With such profound history and with the present dynamic status, the field of
Control Engineering is bound to take a greater elevation.

Vivek N
13ME278
M2
B.TECH V SEMESTER
NITK SURATHKAL