This concise and practical textbook presents an introduction to backstepping, an elegant new approach to boundary control of partial differential equations (PDEs). Suitable for both beginning and advanced graduate students in control theory, with no background beyond that of a typical engineering or physics graduate.

Miroslav Krstic is Sorenson Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the founding Director of the Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UCSD.

List of figures; List of tables; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Lyapunov stability; 3. Exact solutions to PDEs; 4. Parabolic PDEs: reaction-advection-diffusion and other equations; 5. Observer design; 6. Complex-valued PDEs: Schrödinger and Ginzburg-Landau equations; 7. Hyperbolic PDEs: wave equations; 8. Beam equations; 9. First-order hyperbolic PDEs and delay equations; 10. Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, Korteweg-de Vries, and other 'exotic' equations; 11. Navier-Stokes equations; 12. Motion planning for PDEs; 13. Adaptive control for PDEs; 14. Towards nonlinear PDEs; Appendix. Bessel functions; Bibliography; Index.