From the Back Cover
New technological developments have created engineering problems where nonlinear effects have to be taken into account for a successful controller design. Unfortunately, the existing theory for general nonlinear systems cannot successfully deal with them. This book, which summarises the experience of the authors on control engineering applications over the past ten years aims to overcome this drawback by:
- Giving back to modelling the central role that it deserves, and focusing on the structural aspects that can be exploited for the controller design.
- Formalising mathematically current engineering practice, which is usually developed from practical experience and considerations, as opposed to theoretical analysis.
- Proposing new control laws that sometimes are viewed as "upgrades" to the existing schemes.
- Experimental validation, that confronts the new schemes with other theoretical studies or with industrial controllers.
The fundamental concept of passivity and the perspective of control as a suitable interconnection of the system with its environment are key ingredients in all the developments of the book, which is primarily aimed at control-orientated graduate students and researchers, but which will also have value for both practising engineers and those concerned with the more theoretical side of the subject.
The Communications and Control Engineering series reflects the major technological advances which have a great impact in the fields of communication and control. It reports on the research in industrial and academic institutions around the world to exploit the new possibilities which are becoming available.
Romeo Ortega obtained the Docteur D`Etat from the Polytechnical Institute of Grenoble, France in 1984 . He then joined the National University of Mexico, where he worked until 1989. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, USA, in 1987-88 and at McGill University, Canada, in 1991-1992, and a Fellow of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 1990-1991. Currently he is in the Laboratoire des Signaux et Systèmes of Supélec in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, where he holds a position of Directeur de Recherche from the CNRS. His research interests are in the fields of nonlinear and adaptive control with special emphasis on applications. He is a co-author of the Springer-Verlag book Nonlinear Adaptive Control Design and Applications, and has published more than 100 scientific papers in international journals. Dr Ortega has been the chairman of the IEEE Working Group on Adaptive Control and Systems Identification, of the IFAC Technical Committee on Adaptive Control and Tuning and of the Automatica Paper Prize Award Committee. He has served as Associate Editor for various scientific journals. Dr Ortega is a member of the IFAC Technical Board and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Antonio Loría has been a research fellow at the University of Twente, NTNU Norway and UCSB, California. Currently, he has a tenure position as Associate Researcher with the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France. He is author of more than seventy scientific journal and conference papers as well as four book chapters in control theory; of these publications, more than 20 are on robot control. He is co-author of Control of Robot Manipulators in Joint Space by R. Kelly, V. Santibáñez and A. Loría, (1-85233-994-2).
Hebertt Sira-Ramirez has published his work in 4 books, 20 book chapters, many of them in Springer-Verlag volumes, 114 journal publications in credited, refereed, journals and over 192 specialized internationalconferences. He obtained his MSEE and his PhD, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) in 1972 and 1977, respectively. He worked as a professor, and researcher, for 28 years at the Universidad de Los Andes in Merida, Venezuela, and has worked for the last 7 years in a Scientific Research Institute in Mexico City (Cinvestav-IPN). He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Non-Linear Control Systems.
