This paper presents a novel terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) method for maximum power tracking of photovoltaic (PV) power systems. First, an incremental conductance method is used for maximum power point (MPP) searching. It provides good efficiency under rapidly changing atmospheric conditions, but the accuracy for finding the MPP is highly related to the MPP tracking control. Therefore, a TSMC-based controller is developed to regulate the system to the searched reference MPP. Different from traditional sliding mode control, the developed TSMC assures finite convergence time for the MPP tracking. Furthermore, a common singularity problem that exists in traditional TSMC is removed in this paper. Even if considering uncertainty in the PV power system, the TSMC guarantees high robustness. Finally, several simulations and experiments show the expected control performance. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.