Copyright © 2010 J. A. Tenreiro Machado et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Fractional Calculus (FC) goes back to the beginning of the theory of differential calculus. Nevertheless, the application of FC just emerged in the last two decades, due to the progress in the area of chaos that revealed subtle relationships with the FC concepts. In the field of dynamical systems theory some work has been carried out but the proposed models and algorithms are still in a preliminary stage of establishment. Having these ideas in mind, the paper discusses FC in the study of system dynamics and control. In this perspective, this paper investigates the use of FC in the fields of controller tuning, legged robots, redundant robots, heat diffusion, and digital circuit synthesis.