Nonsingular terminal sliding-mode control of a tractor–trailer system

This is the first paper considering finite-time stabilization approach to design a control law for a tractor–trailer system. This robot is a nonholonomic system which cannot be stabilized with continuous control laws. The main contributions of this paper are, first, the transformation of the equations of the system to the bilinear chained form, which simplifies the design of finite-time stabilizing control laws, and then, designing a nonsingular finite-time controller based on the terminal sliding-mode technique. This technique needs some recursive sliding surfaces, which should be mathematically derived, for each application. Efficiency of the designed control law in finite-time stabilization of the tractor–trailer system is shown through computer simulations.