The series Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage technology transfer in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. New theory, new controllers, actuators, sensors, new industrial processes, computer methods, new applications, new philosophies, new challenges. Much of this development work resides in industrial reports, feasibility study papers and the reports of advanced collaborative projects. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of such new work in all aspects of industrial control for wider and rapid dissemination. Almost all physical systems are nonlinear and the success of linear control techniques depends on the extent of the nonlinear system behaviour and the careful attention given to switching linear controllers through the range of nonlinear system operations. In many industrial and process-control applications, good engineering practice, linear control systems and classical PID control can give satisfactory performance because the process nonlinearity is mild and the control system performance specification is not particularly demanding; however, there are other industrial system applications where the requirement for high-performance control can only be achieved if nonlinear control design techniques are used. Thus, in some industrial and technological domains there is a strong justification for more applications of nonlinear methods. One prevailing difficulty with nonlinear control methods is that they are not so easily understood nor are they easy to reduce to formulaic algorithms for routine application.
Frank Lewis is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, where he was awarded the Moncrief-O'Donnell Endowed Chair in 1990 at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas. He is a Charter Member (2004) of the UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars. He has served as Visiting Professor at Democritus University in Greece, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore. He is an elected Guest Consulting Professor at both Shanghai Jiao Tong University and South China University of Technology.
Dr. Lewis's current interests include intelligent control, neural and fuzzy systems, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), wireless sensor networks, nonlinear systems, robotics, condition-based maintenance, and manufacturing process control. He is the author/co-author of 3 U.S. patents, 157 journal papers, 23 chapters and encyclopedia articles, 239 refereed conference papers, nine books, including Optimal Control, Optimal Estimation, Applied Optimal Control and Estimation, Aircraft Control and Simulation, Control of Robot Manipulators, Neural Network Control, High-Level Feedback Control with Neural Networks and the IEEE reprint volume Robot Control. He was elected to the Editorial Boards of International Journal of Control, Neural Computing and Applications, and Int. J. Intelligent Control Systems. He served as an Editor for the flagship journal Automatica. He is the recipient of an NSF Research Initiation Grant and has been continuously funded by NSF since 1982. Since 1991 he has received $4.8 million in funding from NSF and other government agencies, including significant DoD SBIR and industry funding and his research haswon numerous awards and prizes
Doctor Huang is a professor at the Department of Automation and Computer-aided Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also the director of Applied Control and Computing Laborotory, and the head of the graduate division of Automation and Computer-aided Engineering. He has been advisory/visiting professor at several universities and a Science Advisor to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. His research interests include control theory and applications, robotics and automation, neural networks and scientific computing, and guidance and control of flight vehicles. His research has led to publications of over 100 technical papers in international journals and conferences, and four book chapters.
Dr. Huang is a member of Editorial Board of Communications in Information and Systems, Control Theory and Applications, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He was an Associate Editor of the Asian Journal of Control between 1999 and 2001. He has been Guest Editor for International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, and Asian Journal of Control. He has served in the organizing committee or program committee of various major international conferences including the general chair of 2002 International Conference on Control and Automation, Publicity Chair of 2003 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, and program committee member of the 1998, and 2002 IEEE Conferences on Decision and Control.
