Resumen: Some electromagnetic actuators suffer from high velocity impacts during non-controlled switching operations, which cause contact bouncing, mechanical wear, and acoustic noise. Soft-landing control strategies aim at minimizing the impact velocities of these devices to improve their performance. This paper presents a sliding-mode controller for soft landing of single-coil reluctance actuators. It is a switching model-free controller, which results in a very simple implementation. A generalized dynamical hybrid model of an actuator is utilized for deriving the robustness condition, based on the Lyapunov theory. Then, the condition is evaluated for a dynamical model, based on a commercial device, and several reference trajectories. Finally, the controller performance is validated through simulations. The effect of the sampling rate on the resulting impact velocities is also analyzed. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.12.1738 Año: 2021 Publicado en: IFAC PAPERSONLINE 53, 2 (2021), 6256-6261 ISSN: 2405-8963 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.324 - Control and Systems Engineering (Q3)