Sliding-Mode Control for Systems with Stochastic Communication Delays^*

This paper proposes a networked control system to cope with stochastic time delays. The sensor signals are sampled periodically and sent by a computer network with stochastic communication delays of known distribution. The proposed control strategy is based on the sliding-mode control combined with a continuous-time state observer with sampled output signals. The stability properties of the closed-loop system are analyzed using an approach that takes advantage of the knowledge of the stochastic distribution, thus, may be much less conservative than usual robust approaches to deal with time-varying delays. An application example and simulation results illustrate chattering avoidance and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.