Neural Network Based Adaptive Output Feedback Control: Applications and Improvements

To my family, present and future v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My foremost thank goes to my advisor Dr. Anthony Calise. I am greatly indebted to him for his patience and encouragement that carried me on through difficult times, and for his insights and suggestions that helped to shape my research skills. His wisdom and guidance that extend far beyond the contents of this dissertation made it possible for me to arrive at this point. I am also very thankful to the members of my doctoral committee, for taking their time to read and evaluate this thesis. Yavrucuk for their invaluable assistance in my early years at Georgia Tech. Their experience and enthusiasm have helped me produce this work. I extend my thanks to my former and current lab mates Seungjae " Their generosity and brilliance made our lab a warm and creative place to work. I would like to thank Dr. Raffaello D'Andrea of Cornell University for providing me an opportunity to work on the Cornell formation flight wind tunnel test bed and Dr. Jeff Fowler for his assistance in conducting the experiments presented in Chapter 5. I would also like to thank Dr. Mark Costello for providing the nonlinear six degrees-of-freedom spinning projectile simulation code " BOOM " for the simulations in Chapter 2. Finally I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family; my parents Melike and Irfan, my brothers Alper and Halil and their families, and my wife Nilgun for their never ending love and support. My wife Nilgun, in particular, has been with me in every moment of my life during my studies. Without her, this work would have been impossible.