Loosely speaking, adaptive systems are designed to deal with, to adapt to, chang ing environmental conditions whilst maintaining performance objectives. Over the years, the theory of adaptive systems evolved from relatively simple and intuitive concepts to a complex multifaceted theory dealing with stochastic, nonlinear and infinite dimensional systems. This book provides a first introduction to the theory of adaptive systems. The book grew out of a graduate course that the authors taught several times in Australia, Belgium, and The Netherlands for students with an engineering and/or mathemat...

The engineering objective of high performance control using the tools of optimal control theory, robust control theory, and adaptive control theory is more achiev- able now than ever before, and the need has never been greater. Of course, when we use the term high peiformance control we are thinking of achieving this in the real world with all its complexity, uncertainty and variability. Since we do not expect to always achieve our desires, a more complete title for this book could be "Towards High Performance Control." To illustrate our task, consider as an example a disk drive tracking...