A typical plant control system will be subject to the undesirable influence of exogenous commands and disturbances. In order to track and reject these Professor Isidori and his co-authors have designed a feedback control system based on embedding a model of these disturbances within the controller itself - the so-called "internal model".

Beginning with a review of the fundamental principles of internal-model-based feedback control design, Robust Autonomous Guidance moves on to expound recent enhancements to such designs and then to their implementation in systems operating under conditions of great uncertainty.

The three case studies presented: attitude control of a low-Earth-orbit satellite and the landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft on a ship involve control systems coping with a high degree of nonlinear behaviour. The key issues addressed in each case study are the design of an adaptive internal model for the specific tracking task and of stabilizing control capable of steering the tracking error to zero while keeping all internal states bounded for any arbitrarily large but bounded envelope of initial data and uncertain parameters. Nested saturated controls form the basis of novel tools for asymptotic analysis and design.

Robust Autonomous Guidance will be of great interest to academic and industrial researchers working with nonlinear control systems and to engineers involved in the design of aerospatial guidance systems. It will also be a useful reference for graduate students working with non-linear systems.

Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control.

From the reviews: "The book is an excellent combination of theory and real-world applications. Each application not only demonstrates the power of the theoretical results but also is important on its own behalf." IEEE Control Systems Magazine

1. Fundamentals of Internal-model-based Control Theory.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Asymptotic Tracking and Disturbance Attenuation.- 1.3 The Case of Linear Systems.- 1.4 The Issue of Robustness.- 1.5 Design Methods for Linear Systems.- 1.6 Internal Model Adaptation.- 1.7 The Case of Nonlinear Systems.- 1.8 Design Methods for Nonlinear Systems.- 2. Attitude Regulation of a LEO Rigid Satellite.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 The Spacecraft Attitude Control Problem.- 2.3 Satellite Attitude Dynamics.- 2.4 Attitude Error Dynamics.- 2.5 The Internal Model.- 2.6 Design of the Stabilizer.- 2.7 Illustrative Example.- 3. VTOL Landing: Design of the Internal Model.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 The VTOL Model and the Tracking Problem.- 3.3 Design of the Internal Model.- 3.4 Adaptation of the Internal Model.- 3.5 Proof of Proposition 3.4.2.- 4. VTOL Landing: Design of the Stabilizer.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Stabilization of the Lateral¡ªangular Dynamics.- 4.3 Proof of Proposition 4.2.2.- 4.4 Stability of the Interconnection: the Non-adaptive Case.- 4.5 Summary of the Non-adaptive Control Structure and Simu lation Results.- 4.6 Stability of the Interconnection: the Adaptive Case.- 4.7 Summary of the Adaptive Control Structure and Simulation Results.- 5. Robust Nonlinear Motion Control of a Helicopter.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 Helicopter Model.- 5.3 Problem Statement.- 5.4 Stabilization of the Vertical Error Dynamics.- 5.5 Analysis of the Lateral and Longitudinal Dynamics.- 5.6 Structure of the Stabilizer.- 5.7 Stabilization of the Attitude-lateral-longitudinal Dynamics ..- 5.8 Summary of the Control Structure and Simulation Results.- 5.9 Proof of Proposition 5.7.1.- 5.10 Proof of Lemma 5.7.3.- A. Attitude Parameterization.- A.1 Rotation Matrices.- A.2 Quaternions.- B. Input-to-state Stability and Small Gain Theorems.- B.1 Comparison Functions.- B.2 Input-to-state Stability: Definitions and Criteria.- B.3 The Small Gain Theorem.- C. Stabilization of an Uncertain Chain of Integrators by Satu rated Feedback.- C.1 Saturation Functions.- C.2 Robust Stabilization of a Chain of Integrators by Saturated Feedback.- References.