The Invisible Men within the Invisible Engineers

It is a popular fact that engineers are the third most misunderstood people on earth. The second most being, the scientists. While the scientists escape with a wizard tag, people have not grappled the small matter of what an engineer does (See my article "What do you do?" here: http://yaazhi.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-do-you-do.html). Though, in a country like India where the engineers mushroom out in thousands every year, this scenario might not be so much an issue. For every second youngster you stumble upon, would have gone through an engineering college sometime in his life. So we can at least expect these people to understand the work of all engineers. Or is it so ? I believe that there is at least one invisible breed of engineers called the 'Control Engineers'.

The Control Engineers form one of the most misunderstood species among the engineers. One common problem is that people (including engineers) associate a specific product with engineers: Dams with Civil, Gadgets with Electronics, Software with Computer Science, Motors with Electrical, Robots with Mechanical and so on. So someone encounters a Control Engineer, the question, "What product do you do?" goes largely unanswered and they are flummoxed. But a careful analysis will show that Control Engineer forms a part of each of those applications pointed above.


Recently a friend of mine, a control engineer himself, commented on the Segway machine he tried: I know this machine's working is like controlling an inverted pendulum, but when I boarded it, I could hardly feel the Control System at work . That's the truth. Control system works behind the scenes and so is the Control Engineer.


In the Segway case, a trained engineer can guess the sensor which will determine when a user boards the segway or when he wants to move forward. Or he can guess the motor, which actuates the forward and backward motion of the segway. Or he can guess the computer (micro-controller/processor) that forms the intelligent part of the Segway. But what he generally overlooks is the control system which keeps the segway up and running.


Here, the control system is the algorithm which is 'implemented' by means of multiple components like micro controllers, sensors, actuators etc. It is natural that people who like to see things work would be more awed by the external beauty (in the engineering sense) and loose sight of the internal beauty of the mechanism that keeps the device running.


This is precisely why even trained engineers find it difficult to understand who Control Engineers are. This is also a reason why control engineers find it difficult to be part of the 'cool' guys among engineers, because they don't have a product to show-off. But it also says why control engineers are always associated with different engineering fields


When the hippie culture of 1970s suddenly disappeared, someone said, 'there is a hippie within every person, and it is about when it is awaken'. Similarly, we can say that, there is a control engineer inside every engineer. So why do you have a specialization, you may ask ? It is to awaken the sleeping engineer and enable him to make whatever he does in a far better way. A specilization in an already abstract field will only be further abstract and hence makes a lot of people cry foul, largely due to their illusions of detachment from the 'cool' engineering world. But as the technological advances grow, the need for control engineers becomes even more important and work in this area becomes more and more important, though in a more application oriented way.


May be one day, even the common man will understand what a Control Engineer does.


PS1: The top most misunderstood people on Earth are the celebrities. They are the ones who act on and off screen all the time and keep people confused as to who they are or what they do mean.


PS2: Though 'he' has been used in referring to an engineer, the author doesn't intend to show any gender bias. Also, the author doesn't want to entertain thoughts of those who want to argue using measure theory to prove that the need for 's' as prefix to 'he' is of measure zero.