The design of a fractional-order sliding mode controller with a time-varying sliding surface

The novelty of this paper is the usage of a time-varying sliding surface with a fractional-order sliding mode controller. The objective of the controller is to allow the system states to move to the sliding surface and remain on it so as to ensure the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. The Lyapunov stability method is adopted to verify the stability of the controller. Firstly, by using the geometric coordinate transformation that is formerly defined for conventional sliding mode controller, a novel fractional-order sliding surface is defined. The time-varying fractional-order sliding surface is then rotated in the region in which the system state trajectories are stable. The adjustment of the sliding surface slope on the new coordinate axes is achieved by tuning a parameter defined as a sigmoid function. Then, a new control rule is derived. Numerical simulations are performed on the nonlinear mass-spring-damper and 2-DOF robot manipulator system models with parameter uncertainties and bounded external disturbances. The proposed controller is compared with the conventional sliding mode controller with a constant sliding surface and the fractional-order sliding mode controller with a constant sliding surface. Simulation results have shown improved performance of the proposed controller in terms of a decrease in the reaching and settling time, and robustness to disturbances as compared with the related controllers. Moreover, it is seen that the designed controller provides an improvement in the error state trajectories.