Control engineering, also called control systems engineering or automation engineering, is an engineering discipline that applies control theory to design equipment and systems that behave in a desired way, and is typically taught alongside electrical, chemical and mechanical engineering. Control systems use sensors to measure the output of the process being controlled and feed that information back to make corrections, with cruise control in a vehicle as a common example of an automatic control system. The discipline is multidisciplinary, working from mathematical models of a system inputs, outputs and components to design and implement controllers, most often using proportional integral derivative, or PID, controllers to continuously adjust performance. Its applications range from household washing machines to high performance fighter aircraft, and cover mechanical, electrical, fluid, chemical, financial and biological systems. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Core PrincipleControl engineering works by measuring the difference between a system's actual output and its desired setpoint and feeding that error back into the system to generate a corrective action. 1 Sources
1. Control theory (Wikipedia)
Overview sectionQuote, Overview section
The difference between actual and desired value of the process variable, called the error signal, or SP-PV error, is applied as feedback to generate a control action to bring the controlled process variable to the same value as the set point.
2. Centrifugal governor (Wikipedia)
On Governors sectionQuote, On Governors section
In 1868, James Clerk Maxwell wrote a famous paper "On Governors" that is widely considered a classic in feedback control theory.
Control engineering (Wikipedia)
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