This book addresses some of the challenges suffered by the well-known and robust sliding-mode control paradigm. The authors show how the fusion of fuzzy systems with sliding-mode controllers can alleviate some of these problems and promote applicability.

Fuzzy systems used as soft switches eliminate high-frequency signal oscillations and can substantially lower the noise sensitivity of sliding-mode controllers. The amount of a priori knowledge required concerning the nominal structure and parameters of a nonlinear system is also shown to be much reduced by exploiting the general function-approximation property of fuzzy systems so as to use them as identifiers.