🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov19.222938.28354@griffin.itc.gu.edu.au> jchen@tomahawk.me.gu.edu.au (Jinghong CHEN) writes:
>In article <1ednj3INNnup@daisy.ee.und.ac.za> spaday@daisy.ee.und.ac.za (Strini Padayachee) writes:
>>What distinguishes a Control engineer from a SP engineer??

>DSP can be considered as a small part of control. The main differences, as far
>as I can consider, are (1) DSP mainly deals with signals rathan than systems
>(i.e. control focuses on transfer functions, DSP focuses on FFTs). (2) The 
>signals which DSP will handle are much faster than the signals in process
>control.

(Well, it's been awhile since I've seen a flame-fest in comp.dsp, but I 
have a strange feeling that one may be coming on.  :-)

This is not only an oversimplification of the situation; it's just
plain inaccurate.  DSP is *not* a subset of controls.  And DSP uses
transfer functions all the time.  That's exactly how a lowpass filter
is characterized!  DSP and controls use many of the same techniques but
with different goals.  The goal of DSP is simply to process signals --
to manipulate them into a form that is in some sense more useful
(Fourier transforms, lowpass filters, deconvolution, compression,
etc.).  In controls, the goal is to control a process.  Sometimes this
involves manipulating signals, but that isn't an end in itself.  The
goal is to achieve a specified output given a physical system.

As an example, if DSP is a subset of controls, then I would like to
know how data compression fits within a controls framework.  (I realize
that one can make analogies, but that's not the same as saying that
compression is a controls problem.)



--
Stan Reeves
Auburn University, Department of Electrical Engineering, Auburn, AL  36849
INTERNET: sjreeves@eng.auburn.edu