Abstract
The centrifugal flywheel governor (CFG) is a mechanical device that automatically controls the speed of an engine and avoids the damage caused by sudden change of load torque. It has been shown that this system exhibits very rich and complex dynamics such as chaos. This paper investigates the problem of robust finite-time synchronization of non-autonomous chaotic CFGs. The effects of unknown parameters, model uncertainties and external disturbances are fully taken into account. First, it is assumed that the parameters of both master and slave CFGs have the same value and a suitable adaptive finite-time controller is designed. Second, two CFGs are synchronized with the parameters of different values via a robust adaptive finite-time control approach. Finally, some numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed finite-time controllers.