Model reference sliding control of nonlinear systems

Two shortcomings of model reference adaptive control are that it requires the controlled process to have a known structure and that the transient responses are usually not good. The authors present a control scheme to resolve the model reference control problem. The main advantages of this approach are that it can be applied to either linear or nonlinear systems in the same framework and the reference model can be chosen to be of lower order. The ideas of classical model reference control, feedback linearization, and the sliding mode control technique are combined to produce this scheme. The main features are that both nonlinear and linear systems can be handled within the same framework, and high performance of the controlled system can be expected. It is shown by examples that the model following errors are very small in both transient and steady-state cases, something which the classical model reference control scheme usually cannot achieve