On Horowitz's contributions to reset control

Abstract

History shows that Prof. Isaac Horowitz was often ahead of the curve in his feedback control research, especially in developing quantitatively driven design procedures. In some topics his work was so out of line with the main stream that it has received virtually no recognition from the control community until a few decades later. In this paper, we present recent research that was directly motivated by Horowitz's pioneering work on reset controllers in the 1970s. Reset controllers are linear controllers that reset some of their states to zero when their inputs reach a threshold. Horowitz motivated their use by showing that with qualitative design, they can exhibit better performance trade-offs than those in linear, time-invariant systems. This paper supports and advances his thinking by presenting recent theoretical and experimental results on reset control. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.