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ADVANCES IN ADAPTIVE CONTROL is a collection of papers and conference contributions. All the material has been presented at the 1988 and 1989 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and the 1989 and 1990 American Control Conference (ACC). Since the presentations at the conferences eight of the contributions have been published in the Transactions on Automatic Control. The Journal papers have in those cases been reprinted instead of the original conference contributions. The main aim of the volume has been to provide a snapshot of the status of adaptive control in 1990. Through the publishing of these articles many new results are collected and the results can be spread to a larger part of the control community. The editors have made the following hedging: ".-. although volumes such as this enjoy the advantages of providing quick and easy reference to recent developments, they have not been subjected to the peer review process and hence the accuracy of the results cannot always be guaranteed." Despite this the volume gives a good overview of the recent research in adaptive control.
There are 63 papers and articles by 115 authors. The papers are divided into six different areas: adaptive control--the ideal case; time-varying and non-linear systems; robust adaptive control; stochastic adaptive control; applications of adaptive control; and applications of adaptive control to robotics. In a review like this there is no possibility to review the individual papers. Only some reflections on the status of the areas can be appropriate.
The main part of the papers are devoted to the theoretical aspects of adaptive control. However, less noticeable in the present collection than in the conference proceedings. This is natural(?) since most of the research presented at the Conference on Decision and Control and the American Control Conference are done at universities. Less than 10% of the authors in the reprint volumes are affiliated with industry.
The section, adaptive control--the ideal case, contains papers that addresses the stability problem of adaptive control under ideal conditions. Results in this area were