What Is Sliding Mode Control?

 Sliding mode control is a nonlinear control law that has a few nice properties, such as robustness to uncertainties and disturbances, and is relatively straightforward to implement and tune. However, one drawback is chattering where the system state, and therefore, the actuators trying to maintain the state, jitter back and forth quickly, which might not be desirable.

This MATLAB Tech Talk covers mitigations for this chattering. Overall, sliding mode control is worth understanding because it is a really interesting controller, and you might find that it’s right for your application.

This video is divided into three parts. In the first part, be walked through a graphical explanation of the controller to try to get some intuition into how it works. For the second part, see a derivation of it so you understand the mathematics. And in the third part, you’ll see an example of a controller in MATLAB® and Simulink®.

To learn more, see this MATLAB example for sliding mode control design for a mass-spring-damper system: Sliding Mode Control Design for Mass-Spring-Damper System - https://bit.ly/476cNIx

Related Resources:

Capabilities for Modeling Dynamic Systems: https://bit.ly/4bGBNqr

Sliding Mode Control Design for a Robotic Manipulator: https://bit.ly/4dFWPam

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to sliding mode control

01:04 Graphical explanation of sliding mode control

11:13 Derivation of the sliding mode controller

16:20 Example of sliding mode control in Simulink