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Engineering cybernetics: 60 years in the making

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 May 2016

Abstract

The landmark book of Hsue-Shen Tsien, ‘Engineering Cybernetics’, gave birth 60 years ago to an engineering science of interrelations and synthetic behaviors. Clothing the bare bones of Norbert Wiener’s conception of cybernetics, the book delineates for the new science the requirement (of having direct impacts on engineering applications), the aim (of encapsulating engineering principles and concepts), the problems (of analysis, design, and uncertainty), the tools (of basic and advanced mathematics), and the scope (systems that are single input and output or multiple input and output, linear or nonlinear, deterministic or stochastic). The book is a showcase of originality, critical thinking and foresights. In particular, the author calls into question the basic assumption that ‘the properties and characteristics of the system to be controlled were always assumed to be known’ and points out that, in reality, ‘large unpredictable variations of the system properties may occur’. Sixty years later, the full spectrum of Tsien’s prophetic ideas is yet to be fully grasped and engineering cybernetics, as Tsien envisioned, is still in the making.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Advanced Control Technologies, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, 44115, USA

    Zhiqiang Gao

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  1. Zhiqiang Gao
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Correspondence to Zhiqiang Gao.

Additional information

Zhiqiang GAO received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1990 and has taught at Cleveland State University ever since. Faced with ever widening chasm between control theory and practice, Dr. Gao returned to the roots of controls by collaborating extensively with engineers at NASA and industry in solving real world problems, from which the foundation and authenticity of research were rebuilt. Collaborating with Prof. Jingqing Han, Dr. Gao worked quietly on active disturbance rejection control for over 15 years, nurturing it from its early, conceptual stage to a maturing and emerging industrial control technology. In doing so, he made an obscure idea clear and established firmly a general design principle in dealing with uncertainties in industrial settings, often with staggering improvements in performance and energy saving. Asking basic, rudimentary question in research and in teaching, Dr. Gao and his team find creative solutions in practice and vitality in education. Dr. Gao’s research and teaching materials can be found at http://cact.csuohio.edu.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11768-016-5146-2.

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Gao, Z. Engineering cybernetics: 60 years in the making. Control Theory Technol. 12, 97–109 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-014-4031-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-014-4031-0

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