Introduction

Abstract

This chapter begins with a brief introduction of the motivations of the book, a review of the detrimental effect of vibrations on systems, and of the field of SMART materials and structures. This is followed by a discussion of the broad classes of control strategies, namely feedback and feedforward. Next follows a discussion of the various steps of design, the plant description, the error budget, and control budget. The chapter ends with a discussion of the inversion of a rectangular matrix with singular value decomposition (including Tikhonov regularization). The chapter concludes with a reference list.