From conventional control to autonomous intelligent methods

In this article we review the growth and development of control engineering, leading to modern adaptive methods and finally to autonomous intelligent control. Although the use of feedback control can be traced back to ancient and medieval times, it is really during the 20th century that control engineering has become a recognized discipline. Well-established methods to model and control plants with linear characteristics and unchanging parameters are already in existence. Nonlinear plants with time-varying internal parameters are more challenging and the so-called "adaptive" methods have been developed to address this issue. There are controllers that can "learn" by using AI techniques such as expert systems, genetic algorithms, neural networks, etc. These paradigms have evolved mostly from studying biological learning processes.