The centrifugal governor was invented by Christiaan Huygens in the seventeenth century, and used to adjust the gap between millstones. It was not until the mid-19th century that the stability of feedback control systems was analyzed using mathematics, the formal language of automatic control theory. Thus, it was more of an art than a science. The design of feedback control systems up through the Industrial Revolution was by trial-and-error, together with a great deal of engineering intuition. They also described a feedback controller. Two-step level controls for fluids, a form of discontinuous variable structure controls, was developed by the Banu Musa brothers. The Persian Banū Mūsā brothers, in their Book of Ingenious Devices (850 AD), described a number of automatic controls. The appearance of the mechanical clock in the 14th century made the water clock and its feedback control system obsolete. This was the earliest feedback-controlled mechanism. In Ptolemaic Egypt, about 270 BC, Ctesibius described a float regulator for a water clock, a device not unlike the ball and cock in a modern flush toilet. It was a preoccupation of the Greeks and Arabs (in the period between about 300 BC and about 1200 AD) to keep accurate track of time. Job losses and downward mobility blamed on automation have been cited as one of many factors in the resurgence of nationalist, protectionist and populist politics in the US, UK and France, among other countries since the 2010s. The World Bank's World Development Report of 2019 shows evidence that the new industries and jobs in the technology sector outweigh the economic effects of workers being displaced by automation. It was during this time that industry was rapidly adopting feedback controllers, which were introduced in the 1930s. The term automation, inspired by the earlier word automatic (coming from automaton), was not widely used before 1947, when Ford established an automation department. The mathematical basis of control theory was begun in the 18th century and advanced rapidly in the 20th. This closed-loop control is an application of negative feedback to a system. In the simplest type of an automatic control loop, a controller compares a measured value of a process with a desired set value and processes the resulting error signal to change some input to the process, in such a way that the process stays at its set point despite disturbances. It can range from simple on-off control to multi-variable high-level algorithms in terms of control complexity. Automation has also found a home in the banking industry. Examples range from a household thermostat controlling a boiler to a large industrial control system with tens of thousands of input measurements and output control signals. The benefit of automation includes labor savings, reducing waste, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy, and precision.Īutomation includes the use of various equipment and control systems such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers, and heat-treating ovens, switching on telephone networks, steering, and stabilization of ships, aircraft, and other applications and vehicles with reduced human intervention. Complicated systems, such as modern factories, airplanes, and ships typically use combinations of all of these techniques. Automation has been achieved by various means including mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic devices, and computers, usually in combination. Minimum human intervention is required to control many large facilities, such as this electrical generating station.Īutomation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines.
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