Sensing,computing, and actuation: which are central and which are peripheral?
Submitted by: demetri Submitted on: October 11, 2003 Identifier: L1.1 First, the “official” answer: all three are central. In principle, one should be able to identify sensing, computing, and actuating elements in anything we would meaningfully call a control system (cf HW1). The practical answer to this question is largely hardware or system dependent. For example, in the steam engine governor, you would have to take a fairly abstract view of “sensing” and “computing” to identify these elements. Many mechanical feedback mechanisms will pose similar problems, such as the gyroscopic stabilization of spinning bodies (think of a top). Similarly, in more exotic application areas, such as network congestion control, it would probably be difficult to separate computation from actuation concretely; the same device which computes the control law also implements it. Although, abstractly speaking, it does two different things, it would certainly be hard to point to some fundamental physical sepa
