A reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) based a continuous sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed in this paper for the tracking problem of high order Brunovsky systems with the existence of external perturbations and system uncertainties. For this purpose, a composite control is constituted by two consecutive steps. First, the reduced-order ESO (RESO) technique is designed to estimate unknown system states and total disturbance without estimating an available state. Second, the continuous SMC law is designed based on the estimations supplied by the RESO estimator in order to govern the nominal system part. More importantly, the robustness performance is well achieved by compensating not only the lumped disturbance, but also its estimation error. Finally, the tracking performance is examined by carrying out several simulations on robotic systems with compliant actuators as an application example of the high order systems. In addition, the comparative study is conducted between the proposed SMC method with RESO and a feedback linearization control (FLC) with a full-order ESO to confirm the estimation and tracking performance of the proposed scheme.
