Input saturation: academic insights and future trends

Abstract

Input saturation is very important for the analysis and design of control system. Ignoring the input saturation will have an adverse effect on the control system, and even cause the control system to be unstable. In practice, almost all the control systems are affected by input saturation, involving switched systems, multi-agent systems, robot systems and spacecraft rendezvous systems, etc. In the past few decades, a large number of research results have been obtained on input saturation. This paper attempts to give an overview through a bibliometric analysis based on the publications related to input saturation which were published from 2010 to 2020 and retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded database. We give a detailed discussion based on countries, institutions, research areas, journals, authors and author keywords. The main results show that Automatica takes the leading position among the top 10 academic journals, followed by International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. China ranks a leading position in this field, followed by the United States and France. Harbin Institute of Technology has the topmost total articles, citations and h-index. The future research works are highlighted and we summarise the conclusion in end.

Keywords:

• Input saturation
• bibliometric analysis
• academic insights
• actuator saturation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statements

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Numbers 61503105,61903312] and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant Number 2018M632464].

Notes on contributors

Qian Wang

Qian Wang received her Ph.D. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2014. In 2014, she joined Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. She is currently an associate professor in Hangzhou Dianzi University. Her research interests include switched system, nonlinear system, constraint control, intelligent control and robot control.

Yuetao Yang

Yuetao Yang was born in Zhejiang province, China. He received the B.S. degree from China Jiliang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2020. He is now studying for M.S. degree at Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China. His research interests include switched systems, actuator saturation and event triggered control.

Hui Fang

Hui Fang received her master degree in engineering from Zhejiang University of Technology in 2012. She is currently a researcher in the library, Zhejiang University of Technology. Her current research interests focus on bibliometric, especially the applications of bibliometric in various areas.

Yuehua Wan

Yuehua Wan is currently a Professor with the Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China. Until 2019, he has been the Director of the Institute of Information Resource, Library and the Leader with the Science and Technology Innovation Workstations of Education Ministry, Zhejiang University of Technology. He has been a Counselor in multiple institutions, including Thomson Reuters, Elsevier, Scopus and ProQuest. His current research interests focus on the areas of robots and bibliometric, especially the applications of bibliometric in various areas.