Early control textbooks in Russia (Soviet Union)

Abstract

This chapter reviews four of the early control textbooks in Russia (Soviet Union): (1) Foundations of automatic regulation: theory, (2) Lectures on the theory of automatic control, (3) Elements of the theory of automatic regulation, and (4) Some problems in the theory of stability of motion. Foundations of automatic regulation: theory consists of two parts—linear and nonlinear systems.. The book contains basic notions of control; the language of differential equations and transfer functions is used in parallel, and Laplace transform is exploited as the main technique. Lectures on the theory of automatic control mainly contains input–output description of single-input single-output systems and the frequency-domain approach; however the state space language arises in some cases. Elements of the theory of automatic regulation has peculiar features of the time when it was created (the last years of the Stalin era). A long survey of Russian contribution to automatic regulation is presented; Western inventors and researchers are mentioned only in the negative aspect. Some problems in the theory of stability of motion is devoted to the stability of motion. Many new results are presented such as Barbashin–Krasovski theorem on the existence of Lyapunov function, stability under disturbances bounded in L1 norm, and stability of time-delay systems.