inControl

M. Vidyasagar, Hassan Khalil and Stephen Boyd discuss how lasting technical books are written. Topics include transforming course notes into textbooks, choosing readers, balancing formalism with clarity, editing, open access and the effects of language models on scientific writing. The conversation was recorded at IFAC 2026.

Romeo Ortega discusses sliding-mode and adaptive control, passivity-based design and energy shaping. The conversation follows robustness, dynamic normalisation, damping injection, immersion and invariance, power shaping, parameter estimation and sensorless observers, connecting theoretical developments to engineering problems.

Tore Hägglund and José Luis Guzman examine PID control, its history and continuing role in engineering. Topics include analytical tuning, internal-model control, set-point weighting, relay-based automatic tuning, signal filtering, feedforward and large-scale systems, along with education and sustainable process-control applications.