Methods of Chattering Reduction in Sliding Mode Control: A Case Study of Ball and Plate System

In this work, mechanisms for reducing chattering in a sliding mode controller (SMC) for the ball and plate system was developed. A Smoothed Sliding Mode Control (SSMC) scheme was first of all employed for reducing the chattering by replacing the signum function of the SMC with saturation function. Then, a Recurrent Elman Neural Network (RENN) was developed for optimal determination of the switching gain of the SSMC for the purpose of further reduction in chattering. Other variant of SMC developed with a view to further reduction in chattering is Smoothed Super Twisting SMC (SSTSMC). The results from each of the approaches were compared in terms of amplitude of chattering. The best variants were the RENNOSSMC and SSTSMC where the 0.07 m amplitude of chattering in the classical SMC was reduced to approximately 0. In this work, a double feedback loop was designed for the control of ball and plate system, where the inner loop was designed with proportional plus integral plus derivative (PID) controller to control the inner loop actuator. While, the outer loop of the system that controls the position of the ball on the plate was designed with the variants of the SMC in Matlab/Simulink environment.