A plant taxonomy for designing control experiments

Control experiments can have a significant impact on control theory by forcing researchers to confront real world issues. The definition of a control experiment is open as are guidelines for verification and reproducibility. The author deals with the problem of choosing a plant that is appropriate for investigating system-theoretic problems in feedback technology. The term "system-theoretic" refers to fundamental control issues such as nonlinearity, uncertainty, dimensionality, and coupling that transcend a specific hardware realization. This discussion of control experimentation venues is based on a plant taxonomy, that is, a systematic classification of plant properties and the challenges that they present to control experimentation and, indirectly, to control engineering practice. This paper is partially motivated by paper of Hagan et al. (1996), which lists 16 candidate plants for undergraduate control experiments.