From the Control Systems Theory to Intelligent Manufacturing and Services: Challenges and Future Perspectives

Control Science has played over time and still continues to have a key role for the development of human society such that, in the XX century, it has been recognized as an independent discipline. During the ‘50’s, one of the first international scientific congress to address the area of control theory, namely, the “Convegno Internazionale sui Problemi dell’Automatismo”, was held in Italy, at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, Italy. In this context, ten years later, the Automatic Control group of the Università di Ancona was born. In this chapter, we want to revisit the main results achieved in the last 50 years by the Automatic Control group of Ancona focusing, in particular, on the recent achievements about linear and nonlinear control; robust, stochastic, adaptive and optimal control; model predictive control; fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control; aerial, terrestrial and underwater unmanned vehicles control; automotive control; switching systems analysis and control; underwater robotics; intelligent manufacturing and cyber-physical production systems. The contribution aims to provide the main challenges on these topics and their future perspectives.