Cascaded robust fixed-time terminal sliding mode control for uncertain cartpole systems with incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion

This paper proposes a cascaded fixed-time terminal sliding mode controller (TSMC) for uncertain underactuated cartpole dynamics using incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI). Leveraging partial linearization and prioritizing pole dynamics for internal tracking, the proposed controller achieves efficient stabilization of the cart upon convergence of the pole. Stability analysis is carried out using Lyapunov stability theorem, proving that the proposed controller stabilizes the state variables to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of the equilibrium in fixed-time, along with the suboptimality (steady-state error), existence and uniqueness of the solutions. The INDI is also integrated into TSMC to further improve the robustness while suppressing the conservativeness of conventional TSMC. The stability of INDI is rigorously proved using sampling-based Lyapunov function under sampling-based control realm. The simulation results illustrate the superiority of the proposed method with comparison and ablation studies.