"Advanced Topics in Control Systems Theory" contains selected contributions written by lecturers at the second (annual) Formation d’Automatique de Paris (FAP) (Graduate Control School in Paris). It is addressed to graduate students and researchers in control theory with topics touching on a variety of areas of interest to the control community such as cascaded systems, flatness, optimal control, and Hamiltonian and infinite-dimensional systems. The reader is provided with a well-integrated synthesis of the latest thinking in these subjects without the need for an exhaustive literature review.

"Advanced Topics in Control Systems Theory" can be used to support either a one-term general advanced course on nonlinear control theory, devoting a few lectures to each chapter, or for more focused and intensive courses at graduate level. The book’s concise but pedagogical manner will give an ideal start to researchers wishing to broaden their knowledge in aspects of modern control theory outside their own expertise.

Françoise Lamnabhi-Lagarrigue has been Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique since 1993. She has edited several volumes of the Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences (165, 246, 258, 259 and 264) and has a very long list of publications (26 conference papers since 2000 and 30 reviewed journal papers, for example). She is a member of the board of the EU-funded Control Training Site (http://fuzzy.iau.dtu.dk/AU/links.nsf/0/638b2cf250b4bcd1c1256b3f0042a2b6?OpenDocument) together with several other leading European control academics. She has supervised the Ph.D. studies of 9 graduated students.

Antonio Loría has been a research fellow at the University of Twente, NTNU Norway and UCSB, California. Currently, he has a tenure position as Associate Researcher with the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France. He is author of more than seventy scientific journal and conference papers as well as four book chapters in control theory; of these publications, more than 20 are on robot control. He is co-author of Passivity-based Control of Euler-Lagrange Systems: Mechanical, Electrical and Electromechanical Applications by R. Ortega, A. Loria, P.J. Nicklasson and H. Sira-Ramirez (1-85233-016-3).