Disturbance Observer-Based Terminal Sliding Mode Tracking Control for a Class of Nonlinear SISO Systems with Input Saturation

This paper focuses on the trajectory tracking control for general nonlinear single-input single-output (SISO) systems in which the output is not directly related to the control input. To address the tracking problem with the consideration of possible model uncertainty, external disturbance, and control input saturation, we employ the input-output feedback linearization technique and design a finite-time disturbance observer-based terminal sliding mode controller to improve the tracking performance and enhance the robustness. The stability analysis is carried out by using the Lyapunov method. To alleviate the chattering while achieving an acceptable control performance, a boundary layer method is adopted for the trade-off between the high-frequency control actions and the bounded unavoidable nonzero steady-state error. The proposed method is evaluated on the two typical nonlinear systems, which are fully linearizable and partially linearizable, respectively, and compared to the state-of-the-art method in terms of tracking and robustness through comprehensive numerical simulations. The results show that the proposed method not only renders the estimated disturbance error tends to be zero in finite time, but also has superiority in the fast reaction to disturbance and small tracking error without high-frequency chattering.