Research articleStabilization and synchronization for a mechanical system via adaptive sliding mode control

•Adaptive mechanism is introduced into control system in order to compensate the influence of adverse factors.•The control law can reallocate the control component depending on logic switch term.•The proposed control laws do not require online identification of system parameters.

In this paper, we investigate the synchronization problem of chaotic centrifugal flywheel governor with parameters uncertainty and lumped disturbances. A slave centrifugal flywheel governor system is considered as an underactuated following-system which a control input is designed to follow a master centrifugal flywheel governor system. To tackle lumped disturbances and uncertainty parameters, a novel synchronization control law is developed by employing sliding mode control strategy and Nussbaum gain technique. Adaptation updating algorithms are derived in the sense of Lyapunov stability analysis such that the lumped disturbances can be suppressed and the adverse effect caused by uncertainty parameters can be compensated. In addition, the synchronization tracking-errors are proven to converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.