Proceedings of the ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and

Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

IDETC/CIE 2013
August 4-7, 2013, Portland, Oregon, USA

DETC2013-13079

EXPERIMENTS OF SLIDING MODE CONTROL OF TIME-DELAYED DYNAMICAL

SYSTEMS WITH MODEL UNCERTAINTY

Zhi-Chang Qin and Shun Zhong

Tianjin University
Department of Mechanics
Tianjin, 300072, China
Email: qinzhichang123@126.com and ily0 0000@163

ABSTRACT
This paper presents simulation and experimental results
of sliding mode control of nonlinear mechanical systems
with time delay in the control loop. A flexible link oscillator made by Quanser is used as the target system. Geometric nonlinearity of the spring is included in the model,
and the system is assumed to have parameter uncertainties.
A sliding mode control with time delay is designed with the
method of continuous time approximation. Both computer
simulations and experiments show that the sliding mode
control gives quite robust performance in the presence of
model uncertainty.

Jian-Qiao Sun
School of Engineering
University of California
Merced, CA 95343, USA
Email: jqsun@ucmerced.edu

time approximation (LPCTA) approach is proposed by [7]

and has been applied to sliding mode controls of nonlinear
time-delayed systems with uncertainties [8]. This paper further studies sliding mode controls of nonlinear time-delayed
systems both numerically and experimentally.
Sliding mode control has been applied to time-delayed
systems. In [9], a sliding surface in an augmented space
formed by the system output and the reduced order estimator is proposed to stabilize nonlinear systems with mismatched nonlinear term and the nonlinear uncertainty subject to time-varying delay. The Lyapunov Razumikhin approach is used to analyze the stability of the sliding motion.
In [10,11], a virtual state concept for sliding surface design is
investigated. Roh and Oh study sliding mode control for the
robust stabilization of uncertain linear input-delay systems
with nonlinear parametric perturbations [12, 13]. The proposed sliding surface includes a predictor to compensate for
the input delay of the system. The proposed sliding surface
includes a predictor which consists of the current state and
the past control during the period of delay. The predictor
compensates for the input delay of the system. A state predictor with an adaptation scheme is used. He and colleagues
investigate delay-dependent sliding mode control problems
for a class of uncertain time-delay Markov jump hybrid systems [14]. References [15, 16] consider a delay-dependent
sliding mode control for uncertain neutral delay systems.
In [17], the authors apply a delay-independent sliding mode

Introduction
The continuous time approximation (CTA) method is
an eective method to handle systems with multiple independent time delays [1]. Butcher and colleagues [24] developed the method of Chebyshev spectral continuous time
approximation which uses a Chebyshev collocation grid to
study stability and control of linear periodic systems with
time delay. Chebyshev spectral continuous time approximation provides the most accurate solution of time-delayed
dynamical systems. The concept of continuous time approximation is based on the mathematical work on approximating the infinitesimal generator of delayed dierential
equations (DDEs) [5, 6]. A lowpass filter based continuous

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control to a class of parabolic linear uncertain distributed

parameter systems with time-varying delays. Wu and Zheng
have studied a sliding mode control with passivity of a class
of uncertain nonlinear singular time-delay systems [18]. An
integral-type switching surface function is designed by taking the singular matrix into account. A delay-dependent
sucient condition is proposed in terms of linear matrix inequality, which guarantees the sliding mode dynamics. The
same integral sliding surface is used in the sliding mode
control for uncertain stochastic systems with time-varying
delay in [19]. The common method of linear matrix inequalities is used to derive conditions for the global stochastic
stability. The work in [20] makes use of time-delay control
during the sliding phase to reduce the switching gain of the
sliding mode control.
In this paper, we study the sliding mode control of
the system, i.e. the rotary flexible link oscillator made
by Quanser. The control is designed in the extended state
space within the context of the CTA method to account for
the time delay. The system is modelled as a linear plant plus
geometric nonlinearities. The parameter uncertainties are
considered, while the time delay is assumed to be known.
In Section 1, we describe the physical system. In Section
2, we present the full state feedback control by Quanser as
the baseline, and design a robust sliding mode control with
an optimal sliding surface. We show simulation and experimental results of the sliding mode control with time delay
in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper.

0
0
1
0
0
0
0
1

A=
0 6285625 404033 0
0 10247473 404033 0

(4)

3
0

h( x) =
6655048
10849745

is the angular position of the base, and is the angular

position of the link relative to the base module. Two encoders record the angles and the DC motor turns the base
module horizontally to control the motion of the link. The
servo angle is positive counter-clockwise (CCW). The objective of this experiment is to minimize vibrations of the
flexible link when the base follows the command.
The simulations of the linear and nonlinear equations
under the same control law indicate that the system is
weakly nonlinear when the oscillations in are small.

2 Control Design
2.1 Pole Placement Design
Note that (A B) is a controllable pair. The pole placement method is used to design a full state feedback control
of the linear part of the system () = Kx(). This is
provided by Quanser. In this paper, the closed-loop system
poles are chosen as

1 = 30 2 = 40
34 = 12 16

(5)

The objective of the control feedback is to keep both angles

and stable. Its gain is obtained as

(1)

K = [1 2 3 4 ]
= [196383 170254 16697 07987]

h
i
, () is the control voltage of the
where x() =
DC motor, = 0032 and

(3)

B=
617567
617567

1 The System
The experimental apparatus made by Quanser is shown
in Figure 1. The base module is mounted on the load gear
of the SRV02 system driven by a DC motor. The maximum voltage to the DC motor is 10 , which generates the
maximum torque max = 12874 ( ) when the rotation
speed is zero. Two springs attached to the link of the system introduce geometric nonlinearity to the model. With
the Lagrangian method, we obtain the nonlinear governing
equation of the system,

x()

= Ax() + B( ) + h( x)

(6)

We use this control as the baseline, and digitally introduce

time delay to it until the closed-loop system becomes unstable. This time delay is found to be = 0032.
Next, we consider the sliding mode control design
method taking into account the time delay and the system
parametric uncertainties.

(2)

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2.2 Sliding Mode Control Design

Consider a mesh = { = 0 1 } of
+ 1 points in [0 ] such that 0 = 0 1
We define a vector y() =
= .

x () ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( ) , and introduce
an interpolation scheme on the mesh for ( ) where
0 . Equation (1) can be rewritten as
y()

= Fy() + G() + g( y)

h
i
+ S
g(y ) + K()
= (SG)1 SFy

where K is a switching gain matrix to be determined. Consider a Lyapunov function

(7)

F=

A
04

04(1)
01

041

G= 1
D

h( x)

g( y) =
01

(13)

(8)

where

(9)

+ |S
|| |SFy|
g| ||

+ |S
= + |SFy|
g| 0

(14)

(15)

With a choice of a positive parameter , the closed-loop

system is stable.

(10)

D denotes the matrix of the spectral derivative of the

interpolation, D denotes D with the first column removed, and 1 D denotes the first column of D . Several
methods can be used to compute the matrix D including
the continuous time approximation method with low-pass
filter or the interpolation using Chebyshev nodes [2, 7].
Assume that A and h are not known precisely. Let
is an estimate of h. The
be an estimate of A and h
A
estimation errors are assumed to be upper bounded,

A
|h h|
|A A|

1 2
0
2

+ |S
We choose a gain K such that K = |SFy|
g|+()
where () 0 is a positive function of . Then, ()
and the system is stable. Consider a special case K = I
where is a scalar and I is a unit matrix. We have

where

(12)

2.3 Optimal Sliding Surface

Consider the linear part of the system

y()

= Fy() + G()

(16)

Following the steps in [7] to make use of the null space of

the matrix G, we obtain the following transformation of
elementary row operations,

(11)

q = My

is a known vector with

is a known matrix, and h
where A
non-negative elements.
Let (y) = Sy be a sliding surface where 1 .
When the system is sliding on , we have (y) = 0 and
(y)

= Sy = 0. From Equation (7), we have Sy =

SFy + SG + Sg(y ) = 0. This leads to a nominal
control = (SG)1 (SFy + S(y )) Applying the estimates of the uncertain components and adding a switching
term to it, we obtain a control to be implemented

(17)

where for = 8,

I44

M=
0

0
01 0 0

..
00 .0

00 0 1
1 0 0 0 1212

(18)

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Note that the last row of the transformation reported in

[7] consisted of ones for every element, which makes the
transformation not in the form of elementary row operations
and also complicates the LQR performance index design
discussed next. The sliding surface in the original state
space is found by following the same steps as in [7],

minimal oscillations so that the flexible link behaves like a

rigid rod. An example of the tracking simulation is shown
in Figure 4, where the tracking response of the flexible link
is stabilized in the presence of time delay. Recall that the
system is unstable under the LQR control designed without consideration of the time delay. Figure 5 shows the
corresponding control signal and the sliding surface.
Figures 6 and 7 show the experimental results under
the same conditions as the simulations. Hence, these figures
compare with Figures 4 and 5. The sliding mode controller
drives the rotary flexible joint to track the square wave command in the same manner as is observed in the simulations.
This points to the fact that the mathematical model of this
physical system is quite accurate and renders the real-time
controller as good as the one in simulations.
The advantage of the sliding mode control lies in that
it can deal with uncertainties in the model, particularly
nonlinear uncertainties.

S = [50 320217 32175 08862 1 10023

08795 07717 06861 06271 05939 05801]112
(19)

3 Results
We have done extensive numerical simulations and experimental investigations of the rotary flexible joint. Figure
2 presents the experimental results of the pole placement
control with the gain in Equation (6) without time delay.
When the angle tracks a square wave, the flexible link stabilizes quickly within 1, and its amplitude is about 8 . This
represents the baseline of the control system. This control
becomes unstable when the time delay is = 0032.
In this work, we assume that the matrix A and vector
h listed in Equations (2-4) are nominal. Their estimates
used in the control design are chosen to be

0 0
1 0

0 1

= 0 0
A
0 600 38 0
0 1050 41 0

4 Concluding Remarks
In this paper, we have studied a sliding mode control
for the rotary flexible joint system with model uncertainties
and known time delay. We have considered the geometric
nonlinearity and parameter uncertainties. Both simulation
and experiment are carried out to demonstrate the utility
of this control, which stabilizes the system in the presence
of time delay, while the full state feedback control designed
with the pole placement method is unstable because of the
time delay. An improved optimal sliding surface has been
designed. The performance of the sliding mode control is
quite satisfactory.

(20)

x) = 0
h(

(21)

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China through the grant 11172197 and a keyproject grant from the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin.

In the numerical simulation, we first consider the step

response and the tracking response of the system. It is com
where
mon to replace the switching term () by ||+
is a small positive number. We take = 01 and. The
low-pass filtered continuous time approximation method is
used to generate the spectral derivative matrix D with
= 8 [7]. In the simulations and experiments, we choose
= 50.
We have carried out extensive tracking control simulation and experiments. The control objective is to make the
flexible link follow a square wave motion of the base with

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Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics,
7, p. 031011.

The upper bounds are taken to be

= |h|
= 005 |A| h
A

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[17]

[18]

[19]

[20]

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20
15

Control u(t)

10
5
0
5
10
15
20
0

FIGURE 1: The rotary flexible joint apparatus made by

10
Time (s)

15

20

Quanser, Canada
FIGURE 3: The control signal of the rotary flexible link.
The full state feedback control is designed with the pole
placement method without time delay.

40

20
(degree)

(degree)

40

0
20
40
0

10

15

20

20
0
20
40
0

10

15

20

10
Time (s)

15

20

10

10
(degree)

(degree)

20

0
10
20
0

10
Time (s)

15

20

5
0
5
10
0

FIGURE 2: The response of the rotary flexible link under

the pole placement control without time delay. is the
base angle and is the angle of the flexible link.

FIGURE 4: Simulation of the rotary flexible link under the

sliding mode control. is the base angle and is the angle
of the flexible link.

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Control u(t)

4
2
0
2
5

10

15

20

10
Time (s)

15

20

50

50
0

4
Control u(t)

Sliding Surface s(t)

4
0

FIGURE 5: The sliding mode control () and the sliding

surface () of the rotary flexible link in simulation.

2
0
2

Sliding Surface s(t)

4
0

(degree)

40
20

10

15

20

10
Time (s)

15

20

50

50
0

FIGURE 7: The sliding mode control signal () and the

20
40
0

sliding surface () of the rotary flexible link in experiment.

5

10

15

20

10
Time (s)

15

20

(degree)

10
5
0
5
10
0

FIGURE 6: Experimental response of the rotary flexible link

under the sliding mode control. is the base angle and
is the angle of the flexible link.

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