The 1990 Grainger Lectures delivered at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, September 28 - October 1, 1990 were devoted to a critical reexamination of the foundations of adaptive control. In this volume the lectures are expanded by most recent developments and solutions for some long-standing open problems. Concepts and approaches presented are both novel and of fundamental importance for adaptive control research in the 1990s. The papers in Part I present unifications, reappraisals and new results on tunability, convergence and robustness of adaptive linear control, whereas the papers in Part II formulate new problems in adaptive control of nonlinear systems and solve them without any linear constraints imposed on the nonlinearities.

The maturing of adaptive control.- A conceptual framework for parameter adaptive control.- Robust adaptive control: Design, analysis and robustness bounds.- Robust continuous-time adaptive control by parameter projection.- Stability of the direct self-tuning regulator.- Adaptive-invariant discrete control systems.- Stochastic adaptive system theory: Recent advances and a reappraisal.- Adaptive feedback linearization of nonlinear systems.- Adaptive stabilization of nonlinear systems.- Adaptive nonlinear control of induction motors via extended matching.- Global adaptive observers and output-feedback stabilization for a class of nonlinear systems.- Adaptive output-feedback control of systems with output nonlinearities.