C'.

opyright © I ~96 IFAC 4c-042

13th Triennial World Congress, San Francisco, USA

History of Automatic Control to 1960: an overview

Stuart Bennett

Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering, The University of Sheffield

Mappin Street, Sheffield SI 3m, UK, email: s.bennett@Sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract: An outline of the development of control devices and control theory from the
earliest times is given. Devices discussed include the steam engine governor. process
controllers, and servomechanisms. The impact of the second world war on the devel-
opment of classical design methods and on the introduction of the stochastic approach are
covered.

Keywords: Control applications, control education, control history, control technology.

four main periods as follows:

I. INTRODUCTION
Feedback control systems have been used for over 2000
years, however, the word 'feedback' is a neologism intro-
duced in the 1920s by radio engineers to describe para-
sitic, positive feeding back of the amplifier output signal to
the input circuit, entering into common usage in the Eng-
lish speaking world during the latter half of the century.
Automatic feedback is found in a wide variety of systems;
Oldenburger (1978), recalling the foundation of IFAC
commented on both the name and the breadth of the sub-
ject:
I felt that the expression 'automatic control' covered all
systems, because all systems involve variables, and one
is concerned with keeping these variables at constant or
given varying values. This amounts to concern aoout
control of these variables even though no actual auto-
matic control devices may be intentionally or otherwise
incorporated in these systems. I was thinking of bio-
logical, economic, political as well as engineering sys-
tems so that J pictured the scope of IFAC as a very
broad one.
This diversity poses difficulties for historians of the sub-
ject (and for editors of control journals) and the paper does
not attempt to cover all application areas.
The history of automatic control divides conveniently into
• Early Control: to 1900
• The Pre-Classical Period: 1900-1940
• The Classical Period: 1935-1960
• Modern Control: post 1955.
This paper is concerned largely with the first three peri-
ods, other papers in the session ieal with the more recent
period.
2. EARLY CONTROL: TO 1900
Knowledge of Hellenic contra] systems was preserved
within the Islamic culture being rediscovered in the West
towards the end of the Renaissance. New inventions and
applications of old principles ,'merged during the 18th
century-e.g., Rearnur (1683-1757) proposed several
automatic devices for control1in~; the temperature of incu-
bators based on an invention of Drebbel (1572-1663). The
temperature was measured by Ihe expansion of a Jiquid
held in a vessel connected to a V-tube containing mercury.
A float in the mercury operated an arm which controlled
the draft to a furnace and hence the rate of combustion.
Bonnemain (circa 1743-1828) d"vised improved tempera-
ture control systems and based his sensor and actuator on
the differential expansion of melals. During the 19th cen-
tury many thermostatic devices were invented, manufac-
tured and sold. These devices WI!re, predominantly, direct

3008
acting controllers, i.e" the power required to operate the
control actuator was drawn from the measuring system,
The most significant 18th century control development was
the steam engine governor whose origins lie in the lift-
tenter mechanism used to control the gap between the
grinding-stones in both wind and water mills. Watt (1736-
1819) realised it could he adapted to govern the speed of
the rotary steam engine. The Watt governor (1789) had
several disadvantages: it had only proportional control and
hence controlled speed at only one operating condition
(leading to comments that it was <a moderator not a con-
troller'), it had only over a small speed range, and it re-
quired careful maintenance. Many sought to avoid the off-
set inherent in the Watt governor and thousands of patents
were granted.. Typical were the designs of William Sie-
mens (1823-1883) who substituted integral for proportional
action, producing 'floating' controllers, Porter's loaded
governor (1858) could be run at higher speeds and hence
develop greater forces to operate an actuator. A little later
Pickering (1862) and Hartnell (1872) invented spring
loaded governors which operated at higher speeds than the
Watt governor and which were smaller than the Watt and
Porter governors.
Reports of 'hunting' of governors appeared early in the
19th cenrury and there were attempts to determine the
conditions for stable (non-hunting) operation. Poncelet
(1788-1867) in 1826 and 1836, and Airy (1801-1892) in
1840 and 1851 used differential equations to descrihe dy-
namic motion but both met difficulties in fmding the con-
ditions for stable hehaviour. Airy (1851), stated the condi-
tions but his report is so terse that one cannot determine
how he arrived at these conditions. Maxwell (1831-1879)
in his famous paper entitled 'On governors' (1868) de-
scribed how to derive the linear differential equations for
various governor mechanisms At this time mathematicians
and physicists knew that the stability of a dynamic system
was determined by the location of the roots of the charac-
teristic equation, and that a system became unstable when
the real part of a complex root became positive; but how
to determine the location of the real parts of the complex
roots without fmding the roots of the equation? Maxwell
showed, for 2nd, 3rd and 4th order systems, how to do
this but for fifth order equations he was only able to give
two necessary conditions. The paper was little noticed at
the time and it was not until the early years of this cenmry
that the work was assimilated as engineering knowledge.
The problem was taken up by Routh (1831-1907) whose
first results were published in 1874. In 1877 he produced
an exteoded treatise on the 'Stability of Motion' in which
he expounded what we now know as the Routh-HuTWitz
stability criteria. In 1895, the Swiss mathematician Hur-
witz (1859-1919) derived the criteria independently. He
had been asked for help with the mathematical problem by
3009
his colleague Stodola (1859-1942) who was working on a
turbine control problem.
Most 19th century applications were concerned with con-
trolling temperatures, pressures, liquid levels and speed of
rotating machinery: the desire was for regulation and for
stability. However, growth in the size of ships and naval
guns, and introduction of weapc'I1S such as torpedoes, re-
sulted in using steam, hydraulic, and pneumatic power for
position control systems. EngiIlfers began to devise pow-
ered steering engines to assist file helmsman. The fIrst of
powered steering engine, designed by Sickels (1853) was
an open loop system. A closed loop steering engine (1866)
was designed by J McFarlane Gray for Brunei's steamship
the Great Eastern. ]n France, mound the same time, Far-
cot designed a range of closed loop position control sys-
tems, He suggested the names 'serva-moteur' or 'moteur
asservi' and hence our terms 'servomechanisms' and
'servomotors' .
Use of electricity brought with it further requirements for
control systems. For example, ~(]'c lamps need a constant
gap hetween the electrodes, and generally it was helpful to
all users if either the voltage or the current of the electric-
ity supply was kept constant. Electricity also provided
additional tools-for measurement, for transmission and
manipulation of signals, and fc,r actuation. The electric
relay which provided high gain power amplification and
the spring biased solenoid which provided (crude) propor-
tional control action were important devices.
3. PRE-CLASSICAL PERIOD (1900-1935)
Early in the 20th century there 'Nas rapid and widespread
use of feedback controllers for voltage, current and fre-
quency regulation; boiler control for steam generation;
electric motor speed control; ship and aircraft steering and
auto stabilisation; and temperature, pressure and flow
control in the process industric!s. Sales of instruments,
particularly measuring, indicating and recording devices
grew rapidly. The variety of control systems was exten-
sive, however, most were desigled without any clear un-
derstanding of the dynamics of both the system to be con-
trolled, and of the measuring aId actuating devices used
for control. Some systems were complex, involving
complicated control laws, e.g., the automatic ship steering
mechanism devised by Sperry incorporated PID control
and automatic gain adjustment tt) compensate for the dis-
turbances caused when the sea conditions cbanged. In the
1920s, the electricity supply ccmpanies, concerned with
economic operation of steam ge aerating boilers, began to
introduce automatic boiler control systems. These were
complex multivariable systems which sought to control
feedwater level, boiler pressuremd CO2 level by manipu-
lating boiler draught, coal and w;lter feed.
As use spread two major problems became apparent: (i) a
lack of theoretical understanding and no common lan-
guage, and (ii) no simple, easily applied analysis and de-
sign methods. The available analysis tool was the differ-
ential equation and the application of the still not widely
known Routh-Hurwitz stability test. A laborious process,
and one which gives no guidance to the designer on the
degree of stability, or what to do to malee the system sta-
ble. Engineers became puzzled and confused: controllers
which worked well for one application, or for one set of
conditions, were unsatisfactory when applied to different
systems or different conditions. Problems arose when a
change resulted in a change in the major time constant.
This frequently caused instability in what had previously
been, or seemed to have been. a stable system. Some
acute observers noted that the best human operators did
not use an on-off approach to control but used both antici-
pation, backing-off the power as the controlled variable
approached the set-point, and small, slow adjustments
when the error persisted. Sperry tried to incorporate these
ideas into his devices and for many years Leeds resisted
attaching simple on-off control outputs to his recorders
because he realised that this would not provide good con-
trol.
Minorslcy (1922) gave a clear analysis of position control
systems and formulated a control law, which we now refer
to as three term or PlD control, by observing the way in
which a helmsman steered a ship. This work was not
widely known until Minorsky's series of articles appeared
in The Engineer in 1937. But even if designers had been
aware of Minorslcy' s work they would still have lacked
suitable linear, stable, amplification devices to convert the
low power signals obtained from measuring instruments to
a power level suitable to operate a control actuator, Slide
and spool valves developed during the early pan of the
century were beginning to provide the solution for hydro-
mechanical systems, although valve overlap and stiction
were problems that had to be overcome, however, there
was an impasse with respect to amplifiers for electronic
and pneumatic systems.
By 1920 the amplification problem was a serious obstacle
to the further development of long distance telephony.
Improvements in cable design and use of impedance load-
ing had extended transmission distances but the transconti-
nental service in the USA was still dependent on amplifi-
cation. Electronic telephone repeaters in use introduced
distortion and hence limited the number that could be
placed in series. Expansion of network traffic also caused
problems since it meant an increase in bandwidth of the
lines and hence increased transmission loss. Black (1898-
1983) working on the problem realised that if some of the
amplification of a high gain amplifier was sacrificed by
feeding back part of the output. distortion due to noise and
3010
component drift could be reduc<d. On 2 August 1927, he
sketched a circuit for a negatiVE feedback amplifier. Fol-
lowing extensive development work practical trials took
place in 1930 and the amplifier was used in 1931. Black
was assisted by Nyquist (1)89-1976) whose paper
'Regeneration Theory' (1932) l"id the foundations of the
so called Nyquist analysis. This work provided a practical
device-the negative feedback amplifier-and led to a
deeper understanding of the benefits of negative feedback
in systems. It also, eventually, led to a method of analys-
ing and designing control systems which did not require
the derivation and manipulation of differential equations.
and for which experimental data- measured frequency
response-couid be combined with calculated data; from
the combined response the degree of stability of the system
could be estimated and changes necessary to improve the
performance could be seen.
Contemporaneously with Black's work, Mason of the
Foxboro Company developed a pneumatic negative feed-
back amplifier. E H Bristol, a founder of the Foxboro
Company had invented the fl',pper-nozzle amplifier in
1914. Early versions of the amplifier were highly non-
linear and extensive modificatic-ns only succeeded in in-
creasing its linearity to 7% of Ml range. In 1928, Mason
began experimenting with feeding back part of the output
of the amplifier and in 1930 pwduced a feedback circuit
which linearised the valve operation. This circuit also en-
abled integral (or reset) action to be easily introduced into
the system. In 1931, Foxboroxgan selling its Stabilog
pneumatic controller which offered both linear amplifica-
tion (using negative feedback) and integral (reset) action.
There was initial market resistan:::e 10 it, on the grounds of
cost and because its behaviour was not understood. Fox-
boro responded with a bulletin explaining the principles of
the system in clear and simple It:nns, and stressing how it
differed from 'narrow band' comrollers.
The electronic and pneumatic ne.gative feedback amplifiers
were the outcomes of work on industrial problems. During
the same period extensive work was done on analogue
calculating machines under the direction of Vanevar Bush
at the MIT. This led to the design of a high performance
servomechanism by Hazen (1901-1980) and his students.
Hazen also undertook the first major theoretical study of
servomechanisms. His papers, published in 1934, provided
the starting point for the next ge:1eration of control system
specialists.
4 THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 1935-1950
The period 1935-1940 saw adv:mces in understanding of
control system analysis and design made independently by
several groups in different countries. The best known and
most influential work came from three groups in the USA.
The AT & T Company continued its work on the tele-
phone system and was seeking to extend the bandwidth of
communication systems and to obtain good frequency re~
sponse characteristics for voice communication channels-
ideally constant gain over a wide bandwidth with a sharp
cut-off and with a smaII phase lag. Engineers working on
this problem found that if they achieved the desired gain
characteristic then the phase lag was too large. [n 1940.
Bode showed that no definite and wtiversal attenuation and
phase shift relationship for a physical structure exists but
that there is a relationship between a given attenuation
characteristic and the minimum phase shift that can be
associated with it. He also introduced the concept of gain
and phase margins. and the gain-bandwidth limitation.
Mechanical engineers and physicists working in the proc-
ess industries began a systematic theoretical study of con-
trol systems being used, sought to establish a common
terminology. and tried to develop design methods. They
persuaded the ASME to form an Industrial Instruments
and Regulators Committee (1936). Several members of
this loose grouping were aware of developments in Ger-
many and in England. During this period the manufactur-
ers of pneumatic controllers continued to improve and
develop their instruments and by 1940 field adjustable in-
struments with PID control were available, e.g.) an im-
proved version of the Stabilog and the Taylor Fu/scope. In
1942. J.G. Ziegler and N.B. Nichols of the Taylor In-
strument Companies showed how to fmd the optimum
settings for PI and PID control-the so called Ziegler-
Nichols tuning rules. These were extended in the mid-
1950s by Coon.
The third grouP. located in the Electrical Engineering De-
partment of MIT. was led by Hazen and Brown. They
used time-domain methods based on operator techniques,
introduced block diagrams. and used the differential ana-
lyser to simulate control systems. Scholarly interchanges
between MIT and the University of Manchester led to a
differential analyser being built at Manchester and, in
1936. Hartree and Porter with Callender of ICI used the
machine to simulate an industrial control system.
The second world war concentrated control work on a few
specific problems. Important among these was aiming of
anti-aircraft guns. This is a complex problem involving
detection of the position of the aeroplane, calculation of its
furure position and precise control of a heavy gun. The
operation needed up to 14 people to carry out complicated
observation and tracking tasks in a co-ordinated way and it
became clear in 1941 that the cumbersome system of re-
laying manually infonnation obtained from radar devices
to gun controllers was not adequate to combat fast aircraft.
A system was needed in which the radar system was di-
rectly linked to the gun director. which was in turn linked
to the gun position controller. This 'systems' problem
3011
brought together mechanical. el,octrical and electronic en-
gineers and an outcome of thi~ cross-fertilisation was a
recognition that neither the frequency response approach
used by the communication engineers nor the time domain
approach favoured by the mechanical engineers were,
separately. effective design approaches.
Brown at MIT showed how mechanical and electrical sys-
tems could be represented and manipulated using block
diagrams. Hall (1943) showed that by treating the blocks
as transfer functions (using Lapl:iI.ce transforms) the system
transfer locus could be drawn, and hence the Nyquist test
for stability could be used. More importantly the gain and
phase margin could be determined and he introduced M
and N circles which enabled of the closed loop time do-
main behaviour to be estimated. Another group working at
the Radiation Laboratory at MIT designed the SCR-584
radar system which. linked with the M9 director. was de-
ployed in south east England and had a high success rate
against V 1 rockets. The M9 director was designed a BTL
group led by Bode and including Blackntan. Lovell and
Shannon. The SCR-584 system design led to the Nichols
chart design method, work by Phillips on noise in servo-
mechanisms, and Hurewicz's work on sampled data sys-
terns. After the war details of the work were published in
the seminal book Theory of Servomechonisms (James et.
al. 1947). The Radiation Laboratory group used phase
advance circuits in the forward loop to modify the per-
formance of their control system. Other workers, particu-
larly in the UK. used minor loop feedback to modify sys-
tem response and hence found tile Nyquist approach diffi-
cult. Whiteley (1942) of the British Thomson Houston
Company proposed an approach based on plotting the in-
verse functions on a Nyquist diagram, in the same year
H. T. Marcy independently propc,sed a similar method.
Anti-aircraft control raised systc:m design problems since
several units. often designed anc! manufacrured by differ-
ent groups, had to be integrated; overall performance was
dependent not on the performance of individual units but
on how well they worked together. Difficulties of making
units work together led to a deepening understanding of
bandwidth. noise. and non-lineHities in systems. By the
end of the war people such a~ Tustin in England, and
PhilIips. Hurewicz. McColl. Minorsky and Stibbitz in the
USA were concentrating on nail-linear and sampled data
systems. Another major development to emerge from the
fire control work during the war was the study of stochas-
tic systems: Wiener (1894-19641 wishing to contribute to
the war effort proposed tackling the problem of predicting
the furure position of an aircraft. He worked with Bigelow
on implementing his prediction method and he was disap-
pointed that in the end his system was only able to achieve
a marginal improvement (less than 10 %) over the system
developed empirically by the Bdl Telephone Laboratory.
The work led to the report 'The extrapolation, interpola-
tion and smoothing of stationary time series with engineer-
ing applications' (OSRD Report 370, I Feb. 1942), known
as 'the yellow peril' due to its yellow covers and the for-
midable difficulty of its mathematics-which was eventu-
ally published in the open literature in 1949.
By the end of the war the classical control techniques-
with the exception of the Root Locus design method of
Evans-had been established. The design methndologies
were for linear single input, single output systems. The
frequency response techniques, using Nyquist, Bode,
Nichols and Inverse Nyquist charts, assessed performance
in terms of bandwidth, resonance, gain and phase margins
and provided a pictorial view of the system behaviour.
The alternative approach based on the solution of the dif-
ferential equations using Laplace transform techniques
expressed performance in terms of rise time, percentage
overshoot, steady-state error and damping. Many engi~
neers preferred the latter approach because the perform-
ance was expressed in 'real' terms, Le. the time behaviour
of the system. The disadvantage, of course, is that until
the development of the root locus method there was no
simple and easy way in which the designer could relate
parameter changes to time behaviour changes.
The achievements of the classical era were consolidated
and disseminated in books published during the 1940s and
early 1950s. The lEE held a conference in London in 1946
on radar followed by a further conference on servo-
mechauisms in 1947. The USA govermnent paid selected
staff for six months after the war to write up their work.
An outcome was the Radiation Laboratory Series of
books. The conference on 'Automatic Control' (1951) at
Cranfield, England and the 'Frequency Response Sympo-
sium' (1953) in New York marked the start of the transi-
tion period. leading to modern control.
Wartime experience demonstrated the power of the fre-
quency response approach: it also revealed the weakness
of design methods which assumed linear, deterministic
behaviour. Real systems are non-linear, real measure-
ments contain errors and are contaminated by noise, and in
real systems both the process and the environment are
uncertain. But what design techniques can be used which
allow the designer to consider non-linear and non-
deterministic behaviour and to allow for measurement er-
rors and noise? The design problem changed from simply
achieving a stable controller to achieving the ~best' con-
trailer. But what is the 'best' controller? Ziegler &
Nichols had shown how to choose the parameters of a
given type of controller to obtain an 'optimum' perform-
ance of a given control structure. Similarly Whiteley' s
standard forms enabled designers to choose a particular
performance for a range of systems. Work was done on
3012
evaluating a whole range of performance indicators inclnd-
ing IAE, lSE, ITAE, and ITSE. Sterile arguments devel-
oped about which the performana:e indicator was the 'best'
until it was accepted that what was importaut was the
choice of an appropriate performance indicator for a par-
ticular application. Additional to error fWlCtion based per-
formance criteria there was, for certain classes of system,
interest in minimising the time to reach a set-point (e.g.
military target seeking servomechanisms and certain
classes of machine tools). McDondald's 'Non-linear tech-
niques for improving servo performance' (1950) was fol-
lowed during the 1950s by exwnsive work on the time-
optimal problem relating to the single controlled variable
with a saturating control. The problem was studied by
Bushaw (1952), Bellman (1956) aud in 1960 LaSalle gen-
eralised all the previous results showing that if optimal
control exists it is unique and tang-bang. Progress made
in this area is summarised in Oldenburger's book Optimal
Control (1966). The more difficult problem was how to
choose the control structure which would give the best
performance and how to define this ~best' performance?
A model of the plant was needed: either a physical-
mathematical balance equations of mass, energy etc. in
which the parameters are functi('ns of the physical data of
the process or 'black box' modds based on experimental
measurements, e.g., frequency response in which the pa-
rameters are not directly related the physical data of the
systems.
Work on frequency response ideas and design methods
continued throughout the 19508. Design methnds for sys-
tems containing non-linearities were developed as were the
theoretical foundations of sampled-data systems. The
teaching of servomechanisms and control theory spread,
initially through special courses run for practising engi-
neers and graduate students and then through incorporation
within the standard syllabus of many engineering courses,
5 MODERN CONTROL
Some post-war work was influmced by the insights and
new understandings developed during the war but the tra-
jectory of development was, MacFarlane (1979) argues,
largely determined by two factors: (i) the problem which
govermnents saw as important, the launching, manoeu-
vring. guidance and tracking of missiles and space vehi-
cles; aud (ii) the advent of the digital computer. The first
problem was essentially contra of ballistic objects and
hence detailed physical models could be constructed in
terms of differential equations, i:oth linear and non-linear;
also measuring instruments and other components of great
accuracy and precision could be developed and used. En-
gineers working in the aerospac., industries turned to for-
mulating the general differential ~quations in terms of a set
of first order equations, hence th·~ 'state-space' approach.
Bellman srodied the problem of determining the allocation
of missiles to targets so as to inflict the maximum damage.
This led him to formulate the 'principle of optimality' and
to Dynamic Programming. The name was determined by
political expediency, the research was supported by the
Air Force but the then Secretary of Defense had an aver-
sion to the word research and it was assumed would have
an even greater aversion to mathematical research .
. Dynamic' is a word with positive connotations and
'programming' was thought to be more acceptable than
plarming. Bellman went on to srudy optimal control the-
my, using the calculus of variations and later, because of
the boundary value problem inherent in the approach,
sought to formulate deterministic optimisation problems
such that they could be solved using Dynamic Program-
ming. His saw that by applying a particular control policy
the system would reach a region in state-space with a
specified amount of time left. Formulated thus the prob-
lem can handled as a multistage decision process. With
Dreyfus, he developed computer programmes for numeri-
cal solutions to a range of problems. A difficulty with Dy-
namic Programming is the dimensionality problem and
even now, with computing power far beyond anything
available to Bellman, we still need to use approximations
to handle complex systems.
Dynamical problems involving minimising or maximising
some performance index have 'an obvious and strong
analogy with the classical variational formulations of ana-
lytical mechanics given by Lagrange and Hamilton'. The
generalisation of Hamilton's approach to geometric optics
by Pontryagin (1956) in the form of his maximum princi-
ple laid the foundations of optimal control theory. This
and Bellman's insight into the value and usefulness of the
concept of state for the formulation and solution of many
control and decision problems led to extensive and deep
studies of mathematical problems of automatic control.
And, the availability of the digital computer, during the
late 1950s, made a recursive algorithmic solution possible
as opposed to the search for a closed form solution of the
classical approach.
Atbans has placed origins of what is now referred to as
modem control theory as being 1956 and in September of
that year an international conference on automatic control,
organised by the joint control committee of the VDI and
VDE was held in Heidelberg, Germany, During the con-
ference a group of delegates met and agreed to form an
international organization to promote progress in the field
of automatic control. An organising group of seven people
was charged with drawing up plans for an international
federation. The organization, the International Federation
of Automatic Control (IFAC), was officially formed at a
meeting held in Paris on September 11 and 12, 1957. At
this meeting the Russian delegate extended an invitation to
3013
hold the first conference in Mos<:ow in 1960. The Moscow
Conference was an important and highly visible symbol of
the change in direction that had been slowly developing
during the 1950s and it is fitting that at the conference
Kalman presented a paper, 'On the general theory of con-
trol systems' (Kltlman, 1960) tilat clearly showed that a
deep and exact duality existed between the problems of
multivariable feedback control and multivariable feedback
fIltering and hence ushered in a new treatment of the op-
timal control problem.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
The following works have been .;onsulted in preparing this
paper.
Bennett, S. (1976). The emergence of a discipline: aut(}-
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Bennen, S. (1979). A History of Control Engineering
1800-1930. Peter Peregrinus, Stevenage.
Bennett, S. (1984). Nicolas Minorsky and the automatic
steering of ships. IEEE Control Systems Magazine,
4, 10-15.
Bennett, S. (1985). Harold Haz"n and the theory and de-
sign of servomechanisms. 1nl. J. of Control 42, 989-
1012.
Bennett, S. (1992). The development of process control
instruments: the early years Transactions Newcomen
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Bennett, S., (1993). A History of Control Engineering
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the stability criterion. Int. J. Control. SO, 2313-2332.
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MacFarlane, A.G.J. (1979). 111e development of fre-
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Mayr, O. (1970) The Origins ~f Feedback Control. MIT
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