[en] As an emerging effective approach to nonlinear robust control, simplex sliding mode control demonstrates some attractive features not possessed by the conventional sliding mode control method, from both theoretical and practical points of view. However, no systematic approach is currently available for computing the simplex control vectors in nonlinear sliding mode control. In this paper, chaos-based optimization is exploited so as to develop a systematic approach to seeking the simplex control vectors; particularly, the flexibility of simplex control is enhanced by making the simplex control vectors dependent on the Euclidean norm of the sliding vector rather than being constant, which result in both reduction of the chattering and speedup of the convergence. Computer simulation on a nonlinear uncertain system is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method