As in other fields, especially mathematical physics, geometric methods
provide a powerful tool for analysis of nonlinear control systems. The
subject has been developing quickly since the 1980s and the first monographs
to appear were A. Isidori, Nonlinear Control Systems (Springer, 1985 and
1989) and H. Nijmeijer and A. ,J. van der Schaft, Nonlinear Dynamical
Control Systems (Springer, 1990). The rapid development of geometric
methods in control theory, together with the broad variety of problems
treated by those methods, resulted in a need to collect the most important and.
most illustrative results .devoted to particular subfields of geometric control
theory in separate volume