Uwe Helmke, D. Prätzel-Wolters

• The question: What is an adaptive controller? is as old as the word adaptive control itself. In this paper we will adopt a pragmatic viewpoint which identifies adaptive controllers with nonlinear feedback controllers, designed for classes (families) of linear systems. In contrast to classical linear feedback controllers which are designed for individual systems, these non-linear controllers are required to achieve a specific design objective (such as e.g. stability, tracking or decoupling) for a whole prescribed family of linear systems.