Source
r/electronics•
skithrow

Online Linear Control Systems Courses/Study Guides?

Hi guys, I just graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and am in my first semester of grad school. One of the coures is really interesting to me but due to the nature of the professor's teaching method and lack of a lot of material I am having a REALLY hard time with the class.

The class is linear system theory, so it deals a ton with state space systems (for example x(t)' = A(t)x(t) + B(t)u(t), y(t) = C(t)x(x) + D(t)u(t) both time invariant and time variant case), controllability, observability, non linear systems that are linearized (I have especial trouble with this), and fundamental/state transition matrices.

I'm hoping there are some control engineers on here that can offer some advice on other places to get good information, possibly other good books or online courses since I have not found a lot on my own. The book for the course is Linear System Theory by Wilson J. Rugh which unfortunately leaves a lot of the proofs/explanations for things to be figured out (which I'm not doing well on)..

Anyways, I appreciate whatever help you have, thanks!

Posted Mar 11, 2012, 10:06 PM UTC

18
nuticulus•

One of my lecturers has made his lecture notes available on his website. 3F2 covers introduction to state space control, 4F2 covers nonlinear control. The notes are pretty self contained.

3
skithrowOP•

thanks man, i'll check it out

1
agent_x3r•

I found http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems to be a very good reference.

3
skithrowOP•

thanks I've been using that too, it is a great book but I'm looking for something even more so that goes into the theorems and proofs.

1
agent_x3r•

http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471735558.html

This is a good one as well, although personally I skip most of the proofs :P

2
[deleted]•

But then how do you know they're true!? :O

2
owwmyeyes•

Check out MIT's open courseware.

Linearing non-linear systems is pretty straight forward, just tedious. What exactly do you have trouble with?

Also, my favorite book on controls is "Introduction to Dynamic Systems" by Luenberger. It is more of a upper division / graduate level book though.

2
[deleted]•

I'm beginning to think one of the issues is my linear algebra so I'm going over that course using the online MIT lectures again.. The linearization of nonlinear systems just seems confusing sometimes because I've seen the question asked multiple ways. Here is a link to the various types of questions I've struggled with on my homework before with. http://imgur.com/a/XtX5G

The other issues I have are calculating state transition matrices from various types of A(t) matrices... Upper diagonal, diagonal, etc it seems like some of its trivial and some not, I wish there was somewhere that detailed all the different types in a table or something. I'll check out the book, I'm looking for graduate material anyways.

1