The purpose of the paper is to introduce to the control community the brilliant but little-known part of Yakubovich's academic heritage - the method of recursive objective inequalities. This method was successfully used by V.A.Yakubovich and his followers in pattern recognition, adaptive control and robotics. The paper deals with the last two topics. The most of surveyed results were published in Russian. A 1975 video about experiments with the first Soviet self-learning robot will be shown.