Introduction:
The governing of mechanical systems is usually performed through actuators for the changing of positions, speeds, flows, forces, torques, and voltages. The directly measurable output quantities are frequently positions, speeds, accelerations, forces, and currents.
Multilevel Control Architecture
The information processing of direct measurable input and output signals can be organized in several levels.
Level 1:low level control (feed forward, feedback for damping, stabilization, linearization)
Level 2:high level control (advanced feedback control strategies)
Level 3:supervision, including fault diagnosis
Level 4:optimization, coordination (of processes)
Level 5:general process management
Recent approaches to mechatronic systems use signal processing in the lower levels, such as damping, control of motions, or simple supervision.
Digital information processing, however, allows for the solution of many tasks, like adaptive control, learning control, supervision with fault diagnosis, decisions for maintenance or even redundancy actions, economic optimization, and coordination. The tasks of the higher levels are sometimes summarized as “process management.”
