On adaptive sliding mode control without switching gain overestimation

This paper presents some further results on adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) for a class of nonlinear systems with bounded uncertain parameters. Given a large initial tracking error, current ASMC design generally produces an unnecessarily large switching gain, consequently leading to a serious chattering problem or a large-amplitude control jump for the continuous counterpart. To solve such an overadaptation problem, the switching gain adaptation mechanism is first analyzed in this paper, and the adaptation induced by the initial tracking error is suggested to be removed. Then, by exploiting the global sliding mode feature of time-varying sliding mode control and integral sliding mode control, we present two effective methodologies for ASMC design. The proposed ASMC algorithms ensure that there is no overestimation of the switching gain and the system response is not slowed down when a small switching gain is generated. The validity of the proposed methods is verified by both theoretical analysis and simulation results. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.