7.4 Digital control systems

As with many other topics in this text, the study of digital control systems is an entire field of research and practice. Our approach is, as usual, to learn a bit about digital control systems so we might quickly move on to its application while still getting an appreciation of the field. There are many digital control system design techniques. However, given a knowledge of continuous control system design, we choose the most accessible technique: digital emulation design. The idea is to use continuous system controller design techniques to develop a controller transfer function, and then discretize this transfer function using one of the methods described in chapter 6. There are a few details to consider, as we will see in this section. Direct digital controller design techniques, such as \(z\)-plane analogs of the …