This book meets head-on the difficulty of making practical use of new systems theory, presenting a selection of varied applications together with relevant theory. It shows how workable identification and control solutions can be derived by adapting and extrapolating from the theory. Each chapter has a common structure: a brief presentation of theory; the description of a particular application; experimental results; and a section highlighting, explaining and laying out solutions to the discrepancy between the theoretical and the practical.

This book is an ambitious attempt to bridge the infamous gap between theory and practice in control. The book has ten chapters, written by seasoned researchers from all over the world. It is organized in four parts: Large-scale Problems, Aerospace, Vision and Sound and Electromechanical, and covers a very wide range of problems from chemical reactors to magnetic bearings. In spite of the wide diversity of topics and authors a coherent presentation is obtained by a uniform organization imposed by the editors. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the theory and a - scription of the...