Automotive control has developed over the decades from an auxiliary te- nology to a key element without which the actual performances, emission, safety and consumption targets could not be met. Accordingly, automotive control has been increasing its authority and responsibility - at the price of complexity and di?cult tuning. The progressive evolution has been mainly ledby speci?capplicationsandshorttermtargets, withthe consequencethat automotive control is to a very large extent more heuristic than systematic. Product requirements are still increasing and new challenges are coming from...

A large part of today's fervour on robust control research is focused on those techniques which utilise the Variable Structure Control Method and Lyapunov's Second Method, and which constitute the backbone of the so-called "deterministic" control of uncertain systems. The chapters of this book cover a large spectrum of the recent research and introduce the most innovative ideas in the field. Contained within the volume the reader will find: a survey of control Lyapunov functions; new structures of sliding mode controllers with discussion on higher order sliding modes; new techniques for the...