Handbook of Control Systems Engineering

Control engineering or control systems engineering is the engineering discipline that applies control theory to design systems with predictable behaviours. The practice uses sensors to measure the output performance of the device being controlled (often a vehicle) and those measurements can be used to give feedback to the input actuators that can make corrections toward desired performance. When a device is designed to perform without the need of human inputs for correction it is called automatic control. Many designers of interfaces and interaction routines have relied on the impressive findings of the human factors and ergonomics research community; others have begun to enhance these results with emerging results from cognitive science. This handbook is the result of successes and failures, and the casting of “the analytical net” as far as we could throw it. We have relied upon conventional human factors and ergonomics, psychology, cognitive science, and even systems engineering to design, prototype, and evaluate user-computer interfaces and interaction