Event-Triggered Sliding Mode Control for Nonlinear Systems

Event-triggered sliding mode control for nonlinear systems merges the robustness of sliding mode approaches with resource-efficient update strategies. In this paradigm, control signals are generated only when the system deviates beyond a sliding surface, ensuring that trajectories are driven to and maintained on a manifold guaranteeing desired closed-loop dynamics. By reducing unnecessary control actions, event-triggered schemes alleviate computational and communication burdens, critical for networked, embedded, and real-time applications. The nonlinear nature of many practical systems—ranging from robotic manipulators and aerospace vehicles to power electronics—demands designs that ensure stability and performance in the presence of matched and unmatched disturbances, time delays and model uncertainties. Central challenges include avoiding chattering and Zeno phenomena, selecting sliding gains to balance convergence speed and actuator limitations, and ensuring global asymptotic or exponential stability. Recent progress has extended foundational Lyapunov-based analysis to accommodate event-triggering rules, dynamic threshold adaptation and integral sliding manifolds, enabling robust, energy-efficient control solutions with proven performance across diverse nonlinear platforms.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have proposed systematic gain-tuning frameworks for event-triggered sliding mode controllers applied to second-order mechanical systems. These methods establish explicit relations between sliding gains and closed-loop characteristics such as natural frequency and damping ratio, while incorporating actuator time constants and performance criteria. The resulting design guidelines enable rapid selection of control parameters that guarantee robustness against external disturbances and suppress chattering. Experimental validation on a quadcopter altitude controller demonstrates that event-triggered updates significantly reduce computation and energy usage without compromising stability or response speed.

Research from all publishers

In discrete two-dimensional Roesser models with mismatched disturbances, event-triggered sliding mode schemes have been developed using separate horizontal and vertical disturbance observers, alongside a modified reaching law to ensure robust disturbance attenuation under reduced update rates. For general uncertain nonlinear systems with matched and unmatched perturbations, dynamic event-triggered integral sliding mode adaptive optimal tracking controllers integrate adaptive dynamic programming to achieve near-optimal performance on the sliding manifold, while guaranteeing Zeno-free behaviour. In multivariable robot manipulators subject to unknown uncertainties, event-triggered adaptive super-twisting algorithms trigger control updates only upon violation of stability thresholds, thus saving computational resources and communication bandwidth; both simulations and hardware experiments confirm precise trajectory tracking and robust disturbance rejection.

Event-Triggered Sliding Mode Control for Nonlinear Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in event-triggered sliding mode control for nonlinear systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Event‐triggered control: A strategy in which control actions are executed only when a predefined condition on the system state or error is violated, minimising unnecessary updates.

Sliding mode control: A robust control approach that drives system trajectories onto a chosen sliding manifold and maintains them there, ensuring desired dynamics despite uncertainties.

Sliding surface (manifold): A geometric locus in the state space on which the closed-loop system exhibits reduced-order behaviour and robustness properties once reached.

Zeno phenomenon: A pathological condition in event-triggered systems where an infinite number of triggering events occur in a finite time interval.

Matched/unmatched disturbances: Perturbations that respectively do or do not enter the system through the same channels as the control input, affecting the design of robust controllers.

References

1. Novel gain-tuning for sliding mode control of second-order mechanical systems: theory and experiments. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Event-triggered sliding mode control for 2-D Roesser model with mismatched disturbance. Automatica (2024).
3. Dynamic Event-Triggered Integral Sliding Mode Adaptive Optimal Tracking Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems. Symmetry (2022).
4. Adaptive Super-Twisting Tracking for Uncertain Robot Manipulators Based on the Event-Triggered Algorithm. Sensors (2025).