The purpose of the book is to provide an exposition of recently
developed adaptive and fault-tolerant control of underactuated nonlinear
systems. Underactuated systems are abundant in real life, ranging from
landing vehicles to surface ships and underwater vehicles to
spacecrafts. For the tracking and stabilization control of underactuated
mechanical systems, many methodologies have been proposed. However, a
number of important issues deserve further investigation. In response to
these issues, four important problems are solved in this book, including
control of underactuated nonlinear systems with input saturation,
output-feedback control in the presence of parametric uncertainties,
fault-tolerant control of underactuated ships with or without actuator
redundancy, and adaptive control of multiple underactauted nonlinear
systems, including formation control and flocking control of multiple
underactuated systems.