Of course, the obvious answer is B:CP or "Making Sense of Behavior", but
for a student whose university library doesn't have these, can anyone
suggest a useful widely available book that conveys the basics of feedback
control, without too much mathematics? Or perhaps a tutorial on a web
page, if there is one. I looked over the CSG web site, but I don't think
there's anything there that would be useful for someone with no knowledge
of control theory at all. Something that begins with a nice big diagram of
the basic control loop, explained by reference to a domestic thermostat,
would be ideal. I searched on the web, but I haven't found anything
suitable.
This is for a student at another university who recently came across the
work I've been doing on synthetic animation of humanoids, using simple
control systems in the joints to generate realistic movements. She's a
masters student studying animation and came to visit me yesterday. I gave
her an outline of how I've been using control theory, and showed her my
copy of B:CP. She has a computing science background and understands what
a differential equation is, but that's the extent of her mathematical
knowledge.
-- Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.