After 33 years with Monsanto and Solutia, I can’t help thinking like a user. Even as a contractor, the user view pervades my motivations and goals. I would make a lousy sales and marketing person.

Self-regulating systems with feedback loops, i.e., the routing back of the output of a system to its input, have existed since antiquity and have since become an integral part of modern technology.

In the nearly 40 years since electronic control systems first became common features of industrial machines, controls theory has necessarily evolved to keep pace with machine design. Early on, systems ...

Any good athlete will tell you that the key to an exceptional performance is to imagine the task ahead and then to practice until the body can bring this imagined sequence into reality. Similarly, ...

The tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control loops was an important change at HollyFrontier’s Navajo Refinery in Artesia, N.M. Its hands-on, “mandraulic” culture was no longer cutting ...

Stabilizing an inverted pendulum is a classic problem in control theory, and if you’ve ever taken a control systems class you might remember seeing pages full of differential equations and bode ...