L-1 adaptive controller has been recognized for having a structure that allows decoupling between robustness and adaption owing to the introduction of a low pass filter with adjustable gain in the feedback loop. The trade-off between performance, fast adaptation and robustness, is the main criteria when selecting the structure or the coefficients of the filter. Several off-line methods with varying levels of complexity exist to help finding bounds or initial values for these coefficients. Such values may require further refinement using trial-and-error procedures upon implementation. Subsequently, these approaches suggest that once implemented these values are kept fixed leading to sub-optimal performance in both speed of adaptation and robustness. In this paper, a new practical approach based on fuzzy rules for online continuous tuning of these coefficients is proposed. The fuzzy controller is optimally tuned using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) taking into accounts both the tracking error and the controller output signal range. The simulation of several examples of systems with moderate to severe nonlinearities demonstrate that the proposed approach offers improved control performance when benchmarked to L-1 adaptive controller with fixed filter coefficients. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.