The publication of this book is motivated by two backgrounds, a major one and a subsidiary one, respectively.
Firstly, let's talk about the major background. In order to improve the international competitive power of China's tertiary education, Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China released a document, named "Several opinions on strengthening undergraduate teaching works and improving teaching quality of colleges and universities" in the year 2001. The document explicitly points out that foreign language, English in particular,should be applied in general courses and the specialized courses teaching process for undergraduate education. The document also encourages colleges and universities to publish an English version textbook or to introduce an original English textbook, especially the former.
Since 2001, a number of colleges and universities have opened the specialized courses given in English. And most of colleges and universities selected the original English textbook and some colleges and universities just adopted the lecture notes written by teachers. Up till now,few English versions specialized textbook are published, especially about the control engineering.
Next, let's talk something about the subsidiary background. Our university, Dalian University of Technology, always encourage teachers to publish English version textbooks with the distinct specialized characteristic. There are several aspects for this encouragement.Although the original English textbooks are classical, they cannot match the teaching syllabus and teaclung system. Hence the original ones are not suitable for our course and profession construction. Some descriptions in original textbooks, such as signal, figure,equation, case, principle and terminology, are different from those used in relevant courses given in Chinese. The students cannot make a perfect connection with other courses so that they might be puzzled when trying to understand some principles or terminologies,F(xiàn)or most courses, the instructors are faculty of the university who have taught this course in Chinese for several semesters. They would feel comfortable and give a nice presentation with the self-written English textbook, at the same time, and they could bring their professional advantages into the classes.
With the motivation of the above backgrounds as well as the experience of auditing two courses about control theory in the USA, the author of this textbook, who is in charge of teaching the same subject in DUT, realized the urgency of releasing the English version textbook herself. Combined with her two-year teaching experiment, the first edition of ‘Fundamentals of Control Engineering' is about to be published.
The main readers of this textbook are the students with the major of mechanical engineering. Based on the main content of the classical control theory, the author has referred to both several original textbooks in English and Chinese version.