Rogelio Lozano has worked in a number of institutions with a high reputation for control engineering – the University of Newcastle in Australia, NASA’s Langley Research Center and now as CNRS Research Director at the University of Compiègne. He is a very experienced author in the control field having been an associate editor of Automatica and now of International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing. He has published 26 refereed journal articles in the last five years and he is the co-author of 3 previous titles for Springer (not including the first edition of the present title) in the Communications and Control Engineering and Advances in Industrial Control series:Landau, I.D., Lozano, R. and M’Saad, M. Adaptive Control (3-540-76187-X, 1997)Fantoni, I. and Lozano, R. Non-linear Control for Underactuated Mechanical Systems (1-85233-423-1, 2001)Castillo, P., Lozano, R. and Dzul, A., Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines (1-85233-957-8, 2005)In addition to having served (1991 – 2001) as Chargé de Recherche at CNRS, and as, now, Directeur de Recherche at INRIA, Bernard Brogliato is an Associate Editor for Automatica (since 2001) a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews and writes book reviews for ASME Applied Mechanics Reviews. He has served on the organising and other committees of various European and international conferences sponsored by an assortment of organizations, most prominently, the IEEE. He has been responsible for examining the PhD and Habilitation theses of 16 students and takes an active part in lecturing at summer schools in several European countries. Doctor Brogliato is the director of SICONOS (a European project concerned with Modelling, Simulation and Control of Nonsmooth Dynamical Systems) which carries funding of €2 million.Olav Egeland is Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He graduated as siv.ing. (1984) and dr.ing. (1987) from the Department of Engineering Cybernetics, NTNU, and has been a professor at the department since 1989. In the academic year 88/89 he was at the German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen outside of Munich. In the period 1996-1998 he was Head of Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Vice Dean of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, and member of the Research Committee for Science and Technology at NTNU. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 1996-1999 and of the European Journal of Control 1998-2000. He received the Automatica Prize Paper Award in 1996, and the 2000 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. He has supervised the graduation of 75 siv.ing. and 19 dr.ing., and was Program Manager of the Strategic University Program in Marine Cybernetics at NTNU. Currently he is coordinator of the control activity of the Centre of Ships and Ocean Structures. He has wide experience as a consultant for industry, and is co-founder of Marine Cybernetics, which is a company at the NTNU incubator. His research interests are within modeling, simulation and control of mechanical systems with applications to robotics and marine systems.
