Trying to keep it real: 25 Years of trying to get the stuff I learned in grad school to work on mechatronic systems

This paper is about the difficulty of making well known and widely accepted advanced textbook control techniques work in an industrial environment, particularly with mechatronic systems that have large numbers of flexible modes. I will go through the methods that fail if done the standard way and the adjustments I have learned to make over the years which get a lot of them to work. I will also go over the methods that seem to work robustly and without much thought in the industrial environment, explaining why they do work. Finally, I will try to show that understanding the differences and commonalities in these two world views allows us to use the principles of one to improve the other.