Sliding mode control to stabilization of nonlinear Underactuated mechanical systems

In this paper, a sliding mode control was applied to a particular underactuated mechanical system, the inertia wheel inverted pendulum. This mechanical system presents strong non-linearities and instabilities in its dynamic modeling. The technique found for control by sliding mode is very easy to implement, it presents a simple control algorithm which can be easily implemented in a real time system. The simulation results obtained are very interesting, they show the efficiency of the proposed approach and that it has good performance in terms of robustness and stability of convergence both for stabilization and for the rejection of external point disturbances to the system.