Centrifugal flywheel governor (CFG) systems are nonautonomous mechanical systems
that exhibit chaotic behavior. The nonlinearities in the system equation are
responsible for chaos. These systems nullify the damaging effects of changing load
torques and, thereby, control the speed of the engine automatically. In this
article, a backstepping strategy is integrated with sliding mode controls
(SMCs) to synchronize two alike chaotic mechanical devices against model
uncertainties and external disturbances. The mechanical systems are considered to
have different control initial values. Next, adaptation laws are derived to
guesstimate the upper bounds (unknown) of disturbances and uncertainties.
The proposed adaptation laws eradicate the necessity to know the bounds.
These adaptive laws are incorporated with the backstepping SMC laws, and
adaptive backstepping SMC (ABSMC) are proposed. The main aspects of the
proposed controller are smooth convergence, fast transients and improved
robustness. The Lyapunov stability theorem and Barbalat’s lemma confirm
the asymptotic stability of the system. According to simulation results, the
control laws converge the synchronization error to the close neighborhood of
origin.