Model free sliding mode controller for blood glucose control: Towards artificial pancreas without need to...

The mechanism of glucose regulation in human blood is a nonlinear complicated biological system with uncertain parameters and external disturbances which cannot be imitated accurately by a simple mathematical model. So to achieve an artificial pancreas, a method that does not need a model is necessary.

In this paper, a model free third order terminal sliding mode controller is developed and applied to blood glucose regulation system. So in this paper, a data driven control method is proposed which doesn't need a pre specified mathematical model of the system. The proposed method uses a third order terminal sliding mode controller to overcome the problem in finite time without chattering. It also uses a disturbance estimation technique to reject external disturbances. The sliding mode algorithm is equipped with a regression algorithm to release its need to model of the system. It is proved theoretically that the method is stable and the error converges to zero. In order to determine the parameters needed in this method, an algorithm is provided.

Simulation studies are carried out with different scenarios and compared with Model Free Adaptive Control method. At the first scenario, the proposed method is applied to a virtual type- 1 diabetic patient without considering of external disturbances. The blood glucose level of 110 mg/dl is considered as the goal and it is illustrated that the desired glucose concentration is obtained. It is illustrated that the proposed method shows better performance against Model Free Adaptive Controller. Then in the next scenario, blood glucose of the patient is controlled in presence of three meal times during a day with different values of carbohydrate. The maximum of the blood glucose in this scenario is obtained as 168.5 mg/dl and the minimum of it stays on 85.5 Mg/dl. So the patient blood glucose level is almost within acceptable range (70-180 mg/dl) unlike the Model Free Adaptive Controller. In the last scenario, 22 tests are done for different patients (by randomly varying simulator parameters in ± 40% range) and the control performance is evaluated by the well-known Control Variability Grid Analysis CVGA. For all of them, the blood glucose remains in the green zone (safe region) of the CVGA .

Simulation results show that the proposed method acts robustly and can overcome uncertainties and external disturbances. The blood glucose level remains in safe region in all case. So the proposed method can be used in an artificial pancreas.