Preface

Sliding mode control (SMC) is a nonlinear control method. The sliding mode control method alters the dynamics of a given dynamical system (linear or nonlinear) by applying a discontinuous control signal that forces the system to “slide” along a cross-section (manifold) of the system’s normal behaviour. SMC is a special class of the variable-structure systems (VSS). In sliding mode control method, the state feedback control law is not a continuous function of time. Instead, the state feedback control law can switch from one continuous structure to other structure based on the current position in the state space. For over 50 years, SMC has been extensively studied and widely used in many scientific and industrial applications due to its simplicity and robustness against parameter variations and disturbances. The sliding mode control scheme involves (1) the selecting a hyper-surface or a manifold (i.e. the sliding manifold) such that the system trajectory exhibits desirable behavior when confined to this sliding manifold, and (2) finding feedback gains so that the system trajectory intersects and stays on the sliding manifold. Important types of SMC are classical sliding mode control, integral sliding mode control, higher order sliding mode control, terminal sliding mode control, and super-twisting sliding mode control. The new SMC approaches such as super-twisting sliding mode control show promising dynamical properties such as finite time convergence and chattering alleviation. Sliding mode control has applications in several branches of science and engineering like control systems, chaos theory, mechanical engineering, robotics, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and network engineering.