When uncertain systems are actuated by smart material based actuators, the systems exhibit hysteresis nonlinearities and corresponding control is becoming a challenging task, especially with magnetostrictive actuators which are dominated by asymmetric hystereses. The common approach for overcoming the hysteresis effect is inverse compensation combining with robust adaptive control. Focusing on the asymmetric hysteresis phenomenon, an asymmetric shifted Prandtl-Ishlinskii (ASPI) model and its inverse are developed and a corresponding analytical expression for the inverse compensation error is derived. Then, a prescribed adaptive control method is applied to mitigate the compensation error and simultaneously guaranteeing global stability of the closed loop system with a prescribed transient and steady-state performance of the tracking error without knowledge of system parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is validated on a magnetostrictive actuated platform. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.