PREFACE: SPECIAL ISSUE ON CONTROL AND AUTOMATION

Abstract

Automated systems are widely found in engineering applications. Industrial, transportation, energy, and service sectors are filled with such applications. Control is crucial in proper function of an automated system. The present special issue of the Journal of Control and Intelligent Systems is devoted to this subject. The concept of this special issue was conceived at the 8th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation (ICCA 2010), which was held in Xiamen, China, on 9–11 June 2010. In view of the excellence of the papers presented at that conference, the guest editors identified a set of papers in Control and Automation. The authors of these papers were invited to prepare comprehensive and original papers on those topics for peer review and subsequent selection for the present Special Issue of Control and Intelligent Systems. On the basis of the peer review, eight papers were subsequently selected and further revised for inclusion in this Special Issue. The guest editors wish to thank the authors for their dedication and excellence in preparing these papers, and the reviewers for their valuable reviews. The first five papers of the Special Issue describe work on modelling and control of unmanned systems, ranging from robotic systems to satellite. In the first paper “Adaptive Robust Tracking Control of an Underwater-Vehicle Manipulator System (UVMS) with Sub-Region and SelfMotion Criteria,” Zool, Ismail and, Dunnigan present a new adaptive robust control scheme for an UVMS, which allows the tracking of the intersection of multiple local sub-regions that are assigned for each subsystem under the influence of modelling uncertainties as well as additive disturbances. In the presented adaptive control law, a least-squares estimation algorithm is utilized rather than gradient-type approach. The use of the self-motion due to the kinematically redundant system allows performance of multiple sub-tasks (e.g., maintaining manipulability and avoidance of mechanical joint limits). The stability analysis of the proposed controller is carried out using the Lyapunov-like function.