A Comparative Study of Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode and Backstepping Schemes for the Coupled Two-Tank System

This paper presents an implementation of two radically different control schemes for a state-coupled two-tank liquid-level system. This is due to the purpose of transferring theoretical studies to industrial systems. The proposed schemes to be introduced and compared are the nonsingular terminal sliding mode control (NTSMC) and the backstepping control (BC). The performances of the developed methods are experimentally tested on a particular class of second-order nonlinear systems. The main purpose of the considered control schemes is to achieve a tracking trajectory for a coupled-tank system. It is proved that the designed robust controllers guarantee the stability of the corresponding closed loop systems. The obtained results are verified with the same setup test to ensure a suitable basis for their comparison. During the experiments, we resorted to adding an integrator to the backstepping control so that we improve the results, leading to the appearance of the integrator backstepping control (IBC). To focus on the adequacy and applicability of the suggested control layout, theoretical comparisons as well as experimental results are afforded and debated.