Guest editorial special section on recent advances on sliding mode control and its applications in modern industrial systems

The special section presents the recent advances on sliding mode control and its applications in modern industrial systems. With the increased utilization of modern equipment in wide industry applications such as renewable energy systems, distributed generation, smart grid, transportation, robot manipulators, power systems and automotive, emphasis on better performance in terms of the robustness, optimization, reliability and implementation simplicity has become an important requirement. Sliding mode control is recognized as one of the popular and powerful tools in achieving these requirements in industrial systems. The robustness feature eliminates the burden of the necessity of system parameters required for accurate modelling in most applications. In spite of these attractive advantages, the sliding mode control method suffers from chattering existing due to unmodelled dynamics and switching time delays. The effort of the researchers and industry has led to a rapid development of different sliding mode control methods in terms of sliding surface design, sliding surface coefficient selection, sliding-mode observers, chattering reduction methods, and modulation techniques. Especially, the observer and disturbance estimation techniques are widely studied and substantial new observation and estimation techniques have been proposed in the literature. Hence, the objective of this special section is to share the new ideas of researchers and industry on sliding mode control and its applications in modern industrial systems. The summaries of thirteen papers accepted for publication are given below.