This book enables readers to acquire a fundamental knowledge of control theory on classical control, modern control, and advanced control, including representative control methods. From the pedagogic perspective, the author intends that this book helps students to develop an ability to flexibly apply control theory to solve practical engineering problems. In this sense, this book is also a professional reference for engineers dedicated to automation and system control.

This book attaches importance to clarification of how control theory stems from practical applications and emphasizes the dialectic relationship between control theory and practical applications, enabling readers not only to “know how” for practice, but also to “know why” in terms of mathematical essence. Besides, this book provides plenty of original simulation code scripts (in MATLAB) that are complete, interesting, easy for practice, and of application values for engineering activities.

Hao Li is currently Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai, China. He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees from the Department of Automation of SJTU in 2006 and 2009 respectively, and received the Ph.D. degree from the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), France, and the Robotics Center of MINES ParisTech, France, in 2012. His teaching courses include “Automation and System Control”, “Computer Vision”, “Robotics”, and “Data Structures (C/C++)”. His research interests include automation, computer vision, data fusion, and cooperative intelligent systems.