Survey of Transient Performance Control

Control systems have played a key role in the advancement of technologies in almost every field. The technical competition in the fourth industrial revolution has now focused on high performance area. Transient performance control is the ultimate high-performance control and can serve applications such as flexible manufacturing, robots, UAVs, defense industry and medical systems. Rich modern control theories had been developed over the last few decades, and the majority of them are on stability related issues instead of performance. Actual applications lag the theories, causing so-called theory–practice gap. One key factor of the gap is scarcity of control design methods for transient performance. Transient performance control is to guarantee the transient performance specifications such as rise-time, overshoot and settling-time, which are truly demanded in practice. To promote transient performance control, this article reviews the control designs for transient performance, including finite-time stability and control, adaptive and prescribed performance control, and funnel control. The challenges and future research directions are addressed. The new solutions should be tested on typical industrial systems in benchmark against the existing control methods to show performance insurance and improvement of the former over the latter.