Model reference control and model reference adaptive control has since its inception, found application in a wide range of applications from the control of simple mechanical structures to the more complex robotic manipulators. Sliding mode techniques largely simplify the task of tracking the reference model and are capable of accommodating the uncertainties present in the dynamics of the system. In this paper we are concerned with model tracking in finite time for plant and reference model which are given in Hamiltonian format. The method is applied to nonlinear plant and linear model, with particular application to robot control. We also include the addition of a stabilising supervisory controller in terms of the Hamiltonian of the reference model.
