Finite-Time Tracker Design for Uncertain Nonlinear Fractional-Order Systems

This paper considers the problem of finite-time output tracking for a class of nonautonomous nonlinear fractional-order (FO) systems in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. The finite-time control methods indicate better properties in terms of robustness, disturbance rejection, and settling time. Thus, design of a robust nonsingular controller for finite-time output tracking of a time-varying reference signal is considered in this paper, and a novel FO nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller (TSMC) is designed, which can conquer the uncertainties and guarantees the finite-time convergence of the system output toward the desired time-varying reference signal. For this purpose, an appropriate nonsingular terminal sliding manifold is designed, where maintaining the system's states on this manifold leads to finite-time vanishing of error signal (i.e., ensures the finite-time occurrence of both reaching and sliding phases). Moreover, by tacking the fractional derivative of the sliding manifold, the convergence of system's trajectories into the terminal sliding manifold in a finite time is proven, and the convergence time is estimated. Finally, in order to verify the theoretical results, the proposed method is applied to an FO model of a horizontal platform system (FO-HPS), and the computer simulations show the efficiency of the proposed method in finite-time output tracking.