On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:07:28 -0700, Boen S. Liong wrote: (top posting fixed)
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Do you regularly argue with reality?
There are more control systems that are closed without anyone ever knowing the transfer function than there are systems that are designed with a person doing careful analysis. As of 20 years ago many of these were closed without any_thing_ knowing the transfer function, as well. Even today many control loops are closed around plants so nonlinear that an explicit transfer function is laughably inaccurate, and any internal approximations of plant behavior in an auto tune controller is vague and not at all like an accurate model of the real plant behavior.
The statement "An Unstable System is Obvious" is probably more true than "An Unstable System is Useless"*. So trial and error is use_ful_, because its pretty obvious when you've tuned yourself into uselessness.
Any time you approach a control system design you should assess the level of detail that needs to be done. Many control systems can be successfully implemented and tuned by keeping expectations low and tuning conservatively; some _must_ be tuned this way, if the plants are nasty. In either case, you can buy a whole lot of time saved in return for never reaching the full potential of the system.
Conversely, many control system designs must meet high expectations, indeed, if they are going to be technical or commercial successes. For such systems a careful characterization of the plant is necessary, to the point where merely extracting the transfer function is inadequate. The highest-performance systems that I work on routinely require that I work with the mechanical engineers on the design of the plant to make sure that it can be controlled to the required level of performance, and that the control algorithms take multiple nonlinearities in the plant and actuator into account. For such systems "trial and error" would, indeed, just be "error" -- but there are many more systems for which "trial and error" leads to success.
- Indeed, if the various oscillators in the machine that I'm writing this on were dead stable it would be a broken, dead, useless lump of metal and plastic.