Decentralised sliding mode control for nonlinear interconnected systems in the generalised regular form

Abstract In this paper, a decentralised control strategy based on sliding mode techniques is proposed for a class of nonlinear interconnected systems in generalised regular form. All the isolated subsystems and interconnections are fully nonlinear. It is not required that the nominal isolated subsystems are either linearizable or partially linearizable. The uncertainties are nonlinear and bounded by known functions. Under mild conditions, sliding mode controllers for each subsystem are designed by only employing local information. Sufficient conditions are developed under which information on the interconnections is employed for decentralised controller design to reduce the effects of the interconnections on the entire systems. The bounds on the uncertainties have more general forms compared with previous work. A simulation example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.