Int. J. of Adaptive and Signal Processing, Vol. 12, no. 2, March 1998
Robust Control techniques are becoming one of the most important topics discussed in conferences and journals. Although there is an increasing number of textbooks devoted to this area; most of them deal with particular control design techniques, usually from a theoretical point of view. Instead, this text tries to address this shortage of general application-oriented books by giving a general survey of different robust control techniques, focusing on the applications and practical aspects.
The authors (Professors Skogestad and Postlethwaite) wrote this book as a textbook for introducing multivariable control techniques into graduate and advance undergraduate courses. Indeed, the authors concentrate on practical control design, rather than on systems theory presenting many exercises, case studies and worked out examples. Most of the examples come from real systems in the process control and aeronautic industries. This is not too surprising since Professors Skogestad and Postlethwaite are well known for their respective contributions to robust process control and robust flight control. In fact, by giving quite a complete survey of modern multivariable techniques from a practical point of view (especially robust control ones), this book is a source of useful ideas for experiences control engineers.
Although this book approaches the robust control problem from a pragmatic point of view, the presentation is rigorous and the necessary technical is summarized in some appendices, for reference. Nevertheless, the technical results presented could be considered oversimplified, for instance, the discussion of the inverse response of a system (p. 174). Also some of the topics presented deserve a more complete treatment, such as the Q-parameterization of stabilizing controllers (pp. 142-44).
During the last few years, the Internet has become a basic communication tool in the academic world. The authors have taken full advantage of this by making the MATLAB files for the examples, additional worked-out exercises and a list of errors found in the book available on the Internet.
In summary, this book can be strongly recommended not only as a basic text in multivariable control techniques for graduate and undergraduate students, but also as a valuable source of information for control engineers.
Fernando Tadeo
Departamento Automatica
Facultad de Ciencias
Valladolid 47005
Spain