Ulf Holmberg

Professor of Automatic Control Engineering at the School of Information Technology, Halmstad University. Appointed in 2001.

Signal treatment in real-time for control of dynamic processes

Ulf Holmberg's main research area is adaptive and robust automatic control. He became interested at an early stage in adaptive regulators which can be adapted for use in processes with large amplitude variable dynamics.

He has also developed adaptive regulators for use in bio-technological processes where micro-organisms are regulated so as to behave with a specific purpose in mind eg purifying sewage water or producing yeast etc.

Adaptive regulators are only needed where process dynamics undergo dramatic change which can be the case for bio engineering processes where at a critical moment other organisms begin to dominate. In the majority of cases, a fix regulator can deal with the compensation for variation in process dynamics. This is provided that one has taken into consideration the variation in dynamics with the control design. This is called robust control.

For example, a light robot arm which picks up heavy loads can have various resonance frequencies based on the weight of the load. Using a robust control design a robot can move the load quickly and without vibrations and in a prior determined way independent of the weight of the load.