Efficient combined non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control for robust balancing of inverted pendulum cart

The inverted pendulum cart system is widely recognised as a challenging benchmark in control systems and robotics due to its inherent instability and significant nonlinearity. This paper proposes a control methodology based on non-singular fast terminal sliding mode (NFTSM) to stabilise this system. A comparative analysis of the proposed NFTSM approach against various nonlinear techniques such as classical sliding mode control (SMC), terminal sliding mode (TSM), fast terminal sliding mode (FTSM), and non-terminal sliding mode (NTSM) has been conducted. These methods have been evaluated based on their effectiveness in controlling the inverted pendulum cart. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NFTSM offers superior accuracy, rapid response, resilience to uncertainties, disturbance rejection, reduced chattering, and elimination of singularities. The results further reveal that the proposed NFTSM yields lower RMS error, highlighting its efficiency over the compared techniques.