An Experimental Comparison of Sliding Mode and Immersion and Invariance Adaptive Controllers forPosition-feedback Tracking of a Simple Mechanical System with Friction

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, in an experimental facility consisting of a simple pendular device, the performance of a sliding mode adaptive position-feedback tracking controller of mechanical systems with friction reported in the literature. To put this experimental evidence in perspective, we compare the performance of the sliding mode scheme with the one obtained by an adaptive controller designed following the well-known immersion and invariance technique.