Instrumentation & Control - History

Historically, applications of feedback control date back to antiquity (e.g. Egyptian water clocks), though one of the most famous examples in technology is the centrifugal governor for steam engines invented by the Scottish engineer James Watt. The Cambridge contribution to control theory is summarised on our 125th anniversary website.

More recently, in the 1980s, Professor Keith Glover (former Head of the Department of Engineering) and his collaborators established a mathematical formulation of robust control at a time of intense international activity in this area. The underlying mathematics came from the field of operator theory and in combination with new developments in control theory entirely new and computationally tractable solutions were derived. With North American co-authors he received the prestigious IEEE Baker prize for the best paper in all the 1989 journals of the IEEE for this work, which has application in the control of Harrier Jump Jets.

In the early 1990s, the Department's Signal Processing group became well known for their software which enabled old sound and film recordings to be cleaned up. Some information about the Aurora project can be found on the 125th anniversary site.

Even greater fame was achieved by a former member of this group, Dr Mike Lynch, who became Britain's first 'internet billionaire' when he set up his company Autonomy.