Teaching the Difference Between Stiffness and Damping [Lecture Notes]

A necessary step in the design of an effective control system is to understand its dynamics. It is not uncommon for a well-trained control engineer to use such an understanding to redesign the system to become easier to control, which requires an even deeper understanding of how the components of a system influence its overall dynamics. In this issue Henry C. Fu and Kam K. Leang discuss the difference between stiffness and damping when understanding the dynamics of mechanical systems.