Finite-time stabilization of non-autonomous uncertain chaotic centrifugal flywheel governor systems with input nonlinearities

The centrifugal flywheel governor is a mechanical device that automatically controls the speed of an engine and avoids the damage caused by an abrupt change of load torque. Recent research has discovered that this system exhibits very rich and complex dynamics such as chaos. In this paper, the problem of finite-time stabilization of non-autonomous chaotic centrifugal flywheel governor systems in the presence of model uncertainties, external disturbances, fully unknown parameters and input nonlinearities is studied. Appropriate adaptation laws are designed to undertake the system’s unknown parameters. Using the adaptation laws and finite-time control theory, a robust adaptive controller is derived to stabilize the non-autonomous uncertain centrifugal flywheel governor system with nonlinear control inputs in a given finite time. The finite-time stability and convergence of the closed-loop system are analytically proved. A numerical simulation is given to show the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed finite-time controller and to verify the theoretical results of the paper.