Control experiments and what I learned from them: a personal journey

This article is a personal account of my experiences in developing control experiments for the purpose of control research. The article does not address the important questions surrounding the development of control experiments for undergraduate education. Rather, the emphasis is on research, specifically, the role that control experiments can play in motivating new theoretical ideas. To stimulate discussion about these issues I organized a session for the 1997 American Control Conference entitled "Control Experiments: What Do We Learn From Them?" The reader is invited to peruse the various papers that were contributed to that session for further insights into this question.