Robust Adaptive Control

This book presents a solution to a problem in adaptive control design that had been open for 40 years: robustification to disturbances without compromising asymptotic performance. This original methodology builds on foundational ideas, such as the use of a deadzone in the update law and nonlinear damping in the controller, and advances the tools for and the theory behind designing robust adaptive controllers, thus guaranteeing robustness properties stronger than previously achieved. The authors present all stability notions, old and new, that are useful in adaptive control, provide numerous examples, and contrast their analysis to landmark approaches to robustification of adaptive controllers in prior literature. This book develops the Deadzone-Adapted Disturbance Suppression (DADS) control, a novel adaptive control method, and constructs a novel robust identifier that can work in parallel with every direct adaptive controller (not only DADS); it presents a wing rock instability application of DADS and provides ideas for the extension of DADS to cases not studied in the book.

Iasson Karafyllis is professor in the department of mathematics, NTUA, Greece. He is a coauthor (with Z.-P. Jiang) of Stability and Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems (Springer, 2011) and a coauthor (with M. Krstic) of Predictor Feedback for Delay Systems: Implementations and Approximations (Birkhäuser, 2017) and Input-to-State Stability for PDEs (Springer, 2019). He has been an associate editor for the International Journal of Control and for the IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information since 2013 and for Systems and Control Letters and Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems since 2019. His research interests include mathematical control theory and nonlinear systems theory.

Miroslav Krstic is distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and senior associate vice chancellor for research, holds the Alspach endowed chair, and is the founding director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at the University of California, San Diego. He is Fellow of SIAM, IEEE, IFAC, ASME, AAAS, IET, AIAA (AF), and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His awards include the SIAM Reid Prize, Bellman, Oldenburger, Ragazzini, Chestnut, Paynter, Nyquist Lecture, IFAC Nonlinear Control, IFAC Ruth Curtain DPS, Axelby, and Schuck (1996 and 2019). He is editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2026-) and has served as editor-in-chief of Systems and Control Letters (2018-2025) and as senior editor of Automatica (2025-). Krstic has coauthored 19 books on adaptive, nonlinear, and stochastic control; extremum seeking; control of PDE systems including turbulent flows; and control of delay systems.