The authors here provide a detailed treatment of the design of robust adaptive controllers for nonlinear systems with uncertainties. They employ a new tool based on the ideas of system immersion and manifold invariance. New algorithms are delivered for the construction of robust asymptotically-stabilizing and adaptive control laws for nonlinear systems. The methods proposed lead to modular schemes that are easier to tune than their counterparts obtained from Lyapunov redesign.

Professor Astolfi obtained his Doktor in Technischen Wissenschaften (PhD) with medal of honour from the ETH-Zurich in 1995 and a further Dottorato di Ricerca (PhD) from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1996. He was Lecturer in Nonlinear Control Theory at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich (1995-1996) and moved to be Lecturer in Control Engineering at the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London ( between 1996 and 2000. He was a Senior Lecturer and subsequently Reader at the same institution until 2005 when he was appointed Professor in Nonlinear Control Theory. Professor Astolfi has held various visiting lectureships and professorships including at the Terza University of Rome (1996), Rice University, Houston (1999), Kepler University, Linz (2000), Supélec, Paris (2001), the Mittag-Leffler Institute and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, (May-June 2003).

Alessandro Astolfi has been a senior member of the IEEE since 2000 and a fellow of the IEE since 2005. He is a member of the EPSRC Engineering Panel and in 2003 won the Philip Leverhulme Prize "to recognise the outstanding research achievements of young scholars of distinction and promise based in UK institutions" He has been an Associate Professor at the Departmentt. of Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano since 1998

Professor Astolfi serves regularly on the program committees of control-related conferences and is an Associate Editor of the following journals: IEEE Trans. Automatic Control, Automatica, International Journal of Control, European Journal of Control and Systems and Control Letters. He examines for Ph.D. at several institutions and he has published many archival journal papers and book chapters. He also holds (together with the other authors a patent for a power factor precompensator. Since 2000 he has supervised 6 Ph.D. candidates.

Romeo Ortega obtained the Docteur D`Etat from the Polytechnical Institute of Grenoble, France in 1984 . He then joined the National University of Mexico, where he worked until 1989. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, USA, in 1987-88 and at McGill University, Canada, in 1991-1992, and a Fellow of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 1990-1991. Currently he is in the Laboratoire des Signaux et Systèmes of Supélec in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, where he holds a position of Directeur de Recherche from the CNRS. His research interests are in the fields of nonlinear and adaptive control with special emphasis on applications. He is a co-author of the Springer-Verlag book Passivity-based control of Euler-Lagrange Systems, and has published more than 100 scientific papers in international journals. Dr Ortega has been the chairman of the IEEE Working Group on Adaptive Control and Systems Identification, of the IFAC Technical Committee on Adaptive Control and Tuning and of the Automatica Paper Prize Award Committee. He has served as Associate Editor for various scientific journals. Dr Ortega is a member of the IFAC Technical Board and a Fellow of the IEEE.