Introduction

This book is made of two parts, Theory and Applications. In the first Part, two major problems of automatic control are addressed: trajectory generation, or motion planning, and tracking of these trajectories. In order to make this book as self-contained as possible we have included a survey of Differential Geometry and Dynamical System Theory. The viewpoint adopted for these topics has been tailored to prepare the reader to the language and tools of flatness-based control design, that is why we have preferred to place them ahead in Chapters 2 and 3 rather than to release them in an Appendix.