On adaptive sliding mode control without a priori bounded uncertainty

Adaptive Sliding Mode Control (ASMC) aims to adapt the switching gain in such a way to cope with possibly unknown uncertainty. In state-of-the-art ASMC methods, a priori boundedness of the uncertainty is crucial to ensure boundedness for the switching gain and uniformly ultimately boundedness. A priori bounded uncertainty might impose a priori bounds on the system state before obtaining closed-loop stability. A design removing this assumption is still missing in literature. A positive answer to this quest is given by this note where a novel ASMC methodology is proposed which does not require a priori bounded uncertainty. An illustrative example is presented to highlight the main features of the approach, after which a general class of Euler–Lagrange systems is taken as a case study to show the applicability of the proposed design.