9502945 Kanellakopoulos Since most physical systems contain nonlinearities and unknown parameters, adaptive control of nonlinear systems is directly relevant to practical applications. The Principal Investigator's previous research resulted in several new systematic design procedures which deliver high performance over large operating regions without an increase in control effort and without requiring full-state measurements. The proposed research plan will continue the development of a new generation of adaptive systems, in which the nonadaptive part of the controller is capable of guaranteeing boundedness, while adaption is used only for the improvement of transient an asymptotic performance. Additional design tools will be developed that not only result in even stronger stability and performance properties, but are also applicable to larger classes of nonlinear systems, and characterize those classes via geometric conditions. The new tools will be applied to problems which are of importance to commercial applications such as induction motors, the automated operation of heavy-duty vehicles on intelligent highways and semiconductor manufacturing processes, and will develop cooperative research efforts with interested industrial sponsors. The proposed education plan will develop several new undergraduate and graduate courses on linear, nonlinear and adaptive control, as well as an undergraduate laboratory control course. Furthermore, it will enhance the teaching effectiveness of control systems through the early introduction on nonlinear examples and concepts in order to stimulate student interest and ensure their understanding of the fact that linear control theory can only yield regional results for most physical systems. In addition, the education plan includes graphical and symbolic software into the undergraduate and graduate control curriculum, so that students can spend less time deriving complicated expressions and coding them into a simulatio n package, and more time exploring design options, comparing different approaches, and watching the results of their efforts come alive through animation and visual simulation. ***
