John,

I am not an author on this journal paper, however, I originated Input Shaping in my thesis in 1989 and coined the phrase in the early 1990's along with (ZV, ZVD,etc.). (for example the N. C. Singer and W. P. Seering reference in the Journal Article above). In the last (almost) 30 years Input Shaping has been used on millions of machines worldwide (including disk drives for acoustics and for settle time, disk head testers, high precision industrial machines, etc.). It has been used on many cranes including cranes handling nuclear waste, cranes loading nuclear fuel rods into commercial power plant reactors and other less critical crane applications. In crane applications it is used for safety reasons because the load sway is dangerous -- overshoot can cause accidents. It is now taught at many universities.

I enjoyed reading the paper -- I thought it was a great use of Wolfram technology to present this topic. Great job, authors!

I think the history of the topic is a bit inaccurate regarding the references in the 1950's -- in that era they were not really capable of doing Input Shaping (before digital processing). The analog versions of related approaches were really quite different -- Posicast for example, was breaking a step into two analog steps and not really "Input Shaping". However, minor historical points aside I really enjoyed the paper.

Regards,

Neil Singer