Matlab Reviews

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Designing linear control systems with MATLAB: by Katsuhiko OGATA.
MATLAB Curriculum Series; Prentice Hall; Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA; 1994;
ISBN: 0-13-293226-1- Book review
Article in Control Engineering Practice · February 1996
DOI: 10.1016/S0967-0661(96)90087-8
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B o o k Reviews
and extended, since then, to a highly appreciated
commercial sottware product.
The current
MATLAB program is written in C by The
MathWorks Inc., and is highly optimized to provide
a solution package for addressing problems in a wide
range of fields. Typical uses include generalpurpose numerical computations,
algorithm
prototyping, teaching linear algebra and other topics,
and solving special-purpose matrix formulations
such as those associated with automatic control,
statistics, digital signal processing and other fields.
Solving Control Engineering Problems with
MATLAB, by Katsuhiko OGATA.
MATLAB Curriculum Series; Prentice Hail;
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA; 1994; 359 pp.; $35-80;
ISBN: 0-13-045907-0
Designing Linear Control Systems with
MATLAB, by Kats~hiko OGAT&
MATLAB Curriculum Series; Prentice Hall;
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA; 1994; 226 pp.; $33-40;
ISBN: 0-13-293226-1
The books covered by this review can be divided into
two groups: the first four are essentially intended for
engineering students as well as for practising engineers who use MATLAB to solve control engineering problems, while the last book, including selected
studies from expert users of CACSD (computeraided control system design) in a variety of areas, is
the culmination of research experience over many
years in the use of MATLAB toolboxes in robotics
and automotive and aerospace control-system design.
MATLAB Tools for Control System Analysis and
Design, by Duane C. HANSELMAN and Benjamin
C. KUO. Second Edition; MATLAB Curriculum
Series; Prentice Hall; Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA;
1995; 207 pp.; $36-80; ISBN: 0-13-202574-4
Using MATLAB to Analyze and Design Control
Systems, by Naomi Enrich LEONARD and William
S. LEVINE. Second Edition; Electrical/Computer
Engineering/Control Systems Series;
Benjamin/Cummings; Redwood City, CA, USA;
1995; 212 pp.; $20-39; ISBN: 0-8053-2193-4
The first Ogata book, Solving Control Engineering
Problems with MATLAB, is a guide to using
MATLAB in solving control engineering problems.
The basic problems are presented in linear, timeinvariant control systems, which are normally part of
any introductory control course. The many MATLAB programs are accompanied by user-friendly
comments so that readers can follow each step
easily. Many important and useful features are not
discussed in this book, however; for these, the reader
is referred to The Student Edition of MATLAB
(Prentice Hall, 1992) and MATLAB User's Guide
(MathWorks Inc., 1990).
MATLAB Toolboxes and Applications for
Control, by A.J. CHIPPERFIELD and P.J.
FLEMING; lEE Control Engineering Series, No. 48;
lEE Publications; Stevenage, UK; 1993; 237 pp.;
£39-00; ISBN: 0-86341-290-4
Reviewed by: Theodor D. POPESCU
Research Institute for Informatics, Bucharest,
Romania
The book is dedicated primarily to a detailed discussion of how the result of control-systems analysis can
be represented in graphical terms. Chapter 1 contains introductory material, while Chapter 2 gives
background information concerning matrix operations with MATLAB. Chapters 3 and 4 present the
transient-response analysis of control systems with
MATLAB. Chapter 3 is concerned with continuoustime systems and Chapter 4 with discrete-time systems. Chapter 5 deals with the root locus plots. The
problems that may arise in plotting root loci for
continuous- and discrete-time control systems with
MATLAB are dlso discussed. Frequency-response
analyses of closed-loop systems are presented in
Chapter 6, for both continuous- and discrete-time
control systems. Simple design problems based on
the Bode diagram approach are treated in this last
chapter.
Rapidly becoming a de-facto standard for the control
engineer, MATLAB is a high-performance interactive software tool for engineering, numerical analysis and scientific computations. The design and
implementation of a high-level command language
and interpreter lead to an environment that is both
open in structure and extensible by the individual
user. These properties have led to its wide-scale
adoption by the control engineering community.
Originally written in FORTRAN as an interface to
the matrix routines of the Linpack and Eispack
packages, by Cleve Moler in 1980, the first
MATLAB program allowed users to define new
functions and add them to the environment, access
the file system and call other programs from within
MATLAB, or MATLAB from within other
programs. The MATLAB program has been refined
279
280
Book Reviews
The second book by Ogata was written as a companion volume to the author's first booL to illustrate the
power of MATLAB as a tool for synthesizing control
systems, emphasizing pole placement, and optimal
systems design. This book is intended to aid engineering students (at the senior or graduate level) and
practising engineers in their study of the use of
MATLAB in designing control systems.
The book assumes that the reader is familiar with the
material presented in the companion book or its
equivalent. Chapter 1 presents the introductory material, an abbreviated_ version of the first two chapters of the companion book, while Chapters 2 and 3
discuss pole placement and observer design prob=
lems solved with MATLAB. In particular, Chapter
2 deals with continuous-time systems, whereas
Chapter 3 treats discrete-time systems. Chapter 4 is
concerned with the design of optimal control systems; the quadratic optimal control problems, for
both continuous- and discrete-time systems, are
solved using MATLAB. Also, minimum-energy
control of discrete-time systems is discussed in this
last chapter of the book. Many examples in this
book are reproduced from two earlier books by the
author: Modem Control Engineering, (Second
Edition, Prentice Hall, 1990), and Discrete-Time
Control Systems (Prentice Hall, 1987).
Both texts offer a clear, comprehensive approach to
MATLAB so that future engineers can take full
advantage of its problem-solving and design capabilities. Those readers who are not yet familiar with
MATLAB will find these books very useful, in that
they present details of how to write MATLAB
programs to obtain solutions to typical control
engineering problems. The routines that appear in
these books work with the Student Edition of MATLAB and MATLAB versions 3.5 and 4.0, and the
plots are produced from PostScript files generated
with version 3.5 of MATLAB. The two books well
illustrate, by a series of examples, the basic procedures that should be applied in order to solve a
control-system analysis and design problem with the
available soRware tools derived from the MATLAB
package. Pedagogically, these books have a lot of
merit. The material is well selected and well organized, with clear and logically correct arguments. It
is worth mentioning the absence of printing errors
and the clarity of the illustrations, which make the
books easy to read.
The second edition of Hanselman and Kuo's book,
MATLAB Tools for Control System Analysis and
Design, offers many changes from the first edition.
Perhaps the most significant change is the compatibility with MATLAB version 4. The authors present a book/software package (available in both
Windows and Macintosh versions) that provides
readers with ready-to-use M-files in the CSAD
Toolbox for the analysis and design of linear control
systems.
The book is organized in three parts, each containing one or more chapters. Part 1, Getting Started,
introduces the reader to the jump start in running
different MATLAB versions under MS-DOS and on
the Macintosh, and to the main software changes of
this second edition of the book. It also provides
some advice for instructor and student, and some
elements on the hardware and soRware requirements. Part 2, CSAD Toolbox Reference, documents
the CSAD Toolbox in detail. Finally, Part 3, Theory
and Tools, introduces important control-system
concepts: mathematical foundations, state-space
analysis, time-domain analysis, frequency-domain
analysis and design of control systems, and, more
importantly, illustrates problem solving using CSAD
Toolbox functions.
The software provided is user-friendly and takes care
of the programming so that readers can spend more
time on solving control-system problems. The disk
enclosed with this text contains two CSAD Toolboxes, one compatible with MATLAB version 3.5
and one compatible with version 4. The software
changes in this edition include: improvements to and
generalization of some functions, availability of
some automated design procedures, addition of new
functions, improvement of plotting functions, and a
multitude of more subtle changes; little effort is
required from the user to become proficient with this
second edition.
As the authors mention, the rationale behind this
new book is to provide a consistent, convenient, and
productive approach, focused specifically on undergraduate courses in control-system analysis and design. The book offers a set of tools that minimize
the amount of MATLAB knowledge required, and is
of great assistance to both instructors and students.
The key to providing this ease of use is the inclusion
of many menu-driven, user-interactive tools (i.e.,
function M-files).
Such menu options include
finding the rise time, settling time, and percentage
overshoot from a step response plot, finding asymptote angles, angles of departure and arrival, and
marginal stability points on a root locus plot, and
finding the peak resonance, bandwidth, and stability
margins from a frequency response plot. In addition, specific menu-driven tools are provided for the
design of PID, lead/lag, and state variable
controllers.
The book is well-written and concise, the concepts
are introduced gradually and are easy to comprehend, and the examples provided help the reader in
understanding the text. It also contains many exercises that can be solved using the CASD toolbox,
thereby eliminating the need for a solution manual.
Book Reviews
Using MATLAB to Analyze and Design Control
Systems has as its main objective, helping the users
in the practice of control engineering, by teaching
them bow to use MATLAB and SIMULINK, and
how to learn from them. The reason for writing the
second edition of this book was to improve on the
earlier work by including SIMULINK, and by
illustrating the new features of MATLAB 4.2. The
intention of the authors was to present MATLAB by
examples, and as far as possible to show how plots
can be customized to best display important system
and control information.
The book includes eight chapters. Chapters 1 and 2
are devoted to the fundamentals and basic plotting
capabilities of MATLAB. The rest of the book deals
primarily with the use of MATLAB and its Control
System Toolbox for the analysis and design of
linear-invariant SISO control systems. Chapter 3
shows bow to use MATLAB m order to set up
transfer-function and state-space descriptions of
whatever system is of interest. Chapter 4 describes
the MATLAB tools for studying the relation between
the poles and zeros of a linear timc-invariant system
and its time-domain responses; because control
system specifications are often given in terms of the
response to a unit step, the emphasis is on the step
response. Chapter 5 starts by describing and illustrating the creation of root locus plots, the main
emphasis being placed on bow to use these plots to
learn about and design control systems. New,
important commands arc also introduced in this
section. Chapter 6 is dedicated to frequency-domain
plots, for which the design techniques are much
easier to apply to systems that are of very high order
than either root-locus or state-space techniques.
MATLAB provides many commands for state-space
computations that not only allow users to construct
controllers in state-spaoe form, but also help them to
select control parameters so that their systems meet
the performance requirements. Chapter 7 shows
bow to use these commands for investigating and designing control systems in the state space. Chapter 8
of the book is focused on discrete-time systems, referred to as "sampled-data systems". This chapter is
limited to the conversion of continuous-time systems
to equivalent discrete-time systems, to the effects of
sampling on system behaviour, and to the discretetime versions of root locus, Nyquist, Nichols, and
Bode plots.
The book represents, in essence, a collection of
interesting examples in the practice of analysis and
design of control systems, with a comrncntary. The
exercises that end each chapter provide the reader
with a minimum test for an understanding of the
text. The material is well-organized, clear, concise
and readable. This textbook addresses students in
281
control engineering in particular.
It represents
valuable material from the pedagogical point of
view, similar to the three previous books reviewed.
MATLAB
Toolboxes
and
Applications
for
Control contains the material presented at three sessions of the IEE Conference on Control '91, organized in Edinburgh. The main objective of the book,
as the editors mention, is to share experiences in developing tools and applications involving MATLAB,
thereby stimulating readers to use these techniques,
or to develop their own tools for their own purposes.
The book is composed of three parts: Introduction,
Toolboxes, and Appfications. For completeness,
some introductory MATLAB material is included in
Chapter 1. Chapter 2, ending the Introduction,
considers a topical practical application concerned
with automotive suspension, in which a variety of
features of MATLAB are exercised to great effect.
MATLAB, and in particular the Control Systems
Toolbox, is used to motivate the desirability of
advanced suspension systems, by comparing the
responses of linear dynamic representations of
passive and active design. This is done in both the
time and the frequency domains. Built-in control
analysis functions (such as root locus) are used to
determine the necessary feedback structure for the
closed loop.
Chapter 3, the first in Part II, Toolboxes, discusses
the development and integration of SIMULINK, a
graphically oriented nonlinear simulation package,
into MATLAB. The open-system philosophy of
MATLAB is carried over into SIMULINK, where
blocks and analysis tools can be added to the package, providing considerable versatility and enabling
users to create application-specific functions, and
interface efficiently with other MATLAB routines.
Chapter 4 introduces the use of optimization as a
control-system design tool, addresses specific uses
for control engineers, and includes a worked example. This toolbox extends the usual complement of
optimization routines by incorporating techniques
such as goal attainment, used in commonly occurring optimization problems with multiple competing
objectives rather than the conventional, but unrealistic, single objective. It is also noted how, through
the open structure of MATLAB, a paralld-processing platform may be accessed to alleviate the computational burden associated with multi-objective
optimization problems.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to multivariate frequency
domain methods addressing, in particular, the work
of the "British School".
Nyquist array and
characteristic locus methods are accommodated,
together with the important structured singular value
282
Book Reviews
design criteria arising from the US research. The
topics discussed in the three preceding chapters are
addressed in Chapter 6, through alternative approaches and extensions. A simple language, SYM,
for entering transfer function details in a natural
way, is provided by the System Toolbox. This
toolbox also supports the means of version comparison when developing certain designs, and l~s some
matrix editing and multivariable frequency response
tools with the ability to use symbolic representations.
A tutorial example demonstrates many of these
features. The chapter also describes the L-2 Toolbox, which performs specific optimization operations
on control-system sensitivity and error measures.
In Chapter 7 it is demonstrated how MATLAB can
be incorporated into an expert-system environment,
essentially providing the numerical engine to support this advanced design approach. Chapter 8 is
concerned with PID controllers, and provides a set of
tools for obtaining controller parameters by such
means as the Ziegler-Nichols and AstrOm-Hagglund
methods. In addition, this chapter includes an
investigation into the optimization of integral performance criteria, providing new results.
Similarly employing a menu-driven approach, in
Chapter 9 programs are described for teaching
various aspects of nonlinear control, and for the
study of simple nonlinear feedback systems.
MATLAB's mex-file facility is used to link with
FORTRAN libraries and to simulation sottware.
Stability analysis is accommodated by tools for the
use of the describing function method, Popov and
Circle criteria; Tsypldn's method is employed for the
study of limit cycles and, thence, stability.
The aim of Chapter 10, the first of Part III of the
book, on Applications, is to illustrate how data
recorded from a complex nonlinear system can be
processed using the MATLAB package, employing
state-space filtering methods. The example presented is based upon an aircraft engine, and shows
how optimal and Kalman filtering are used to
remove sensor noise, high-frequency structural
responses of the airframe and aliasing effects arising
from the sampled data. In Chapter 11 the eigenstructure assignment approach to an aerospace
application is described. A number of algorithms
are discussed, that are realized in MATLAB and
applied to the control of a linear model of the lateral
motion of an MS760 Paris fighter-trainer aircraft.
Robot control constitutes the subject of Chapter 12,
where MATLAB provides an excellent environment
for the construction of tools to apply a frequencydomain-based approach to problems where performance tolerances are tight and plant dynamics have
significant degrees of uncertainty.
Chapter 13
consists of two advanced control applications of H °°
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to practical systems: a novel robot, the Tetrabot, and
a helicopter. These applications combine the use of
the Control System Toolbox, the Robust Control
Toolbox and SIMULINK.
This book, in comparison with the first four books, is
a more condensed one, with more information. The
contributions included in the book come from
leading researchers in academia and industry, and
can be of interest to both prospective and existing
users of MATLAB, providing in-depth descriptions
and examples of its use. It will appeal to students,
teachers and practising control engineers alike.
Although the book is the result of thirteen contributions, the material is well organized and presented
with clarity, the reader's understanding being helped
with many examples, presented in sufficient detail.
The conclusions of the chapters are convincing,
original and significant for the application under
study. Also, the references are up-to-date, and offer
the reader information on the sources necessary for a
better understanding the subjects being discussed.
It can be concluded that MATLAB is now a widely
accepted tool for the computer-aided analysis and
design of control systems, with an open structure,
encouraging users to devise new toolboxes and
applications, customized, to varying degrees, for
their particular problem domains. In this reviewer's
opinion, the books represent a valuable addition to
the existing books dedicated to MATLAB-based
software tools, and to the control applications that
can be developed by the use of these software tools.
Engineering Problem Solving with MATLAB,
by D.M. ETTER. MATLAB Curriculum Series;
Prentice Hall; Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA; 1993;
xxiv + 434 pp., + 3.5-inch diskette; $39;
ISBN: 0-13-280470-0
Numerical Analysis and Graphics Visualization
with MATLAB, by Shoichiro NAKAMURA;
Prentice Hall; Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA; 1996;
xii + 477 pp., + diskette available from MathWorks;
$55; ISBN: 0-13-051518-3
Computational Aids in Control Systems Using
MATLAB, by Hadi SAADAT. McGraw-Hill Series
in Electrical and Computer Engineering---Control
Theory; McGraw-Hill; New York, USA; 1993;
141 pp, + 5.25-inch diskette; $26-82;
ISBN: 0-07-911358-3
Reviewed by: Janusz ZALEWSKI
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University,
Daytona Beach, FL, USA
Some people think of MATLAB primarily as a tool
for control engineering.
This may seem true,