Chaos control may be understood as the use of tiny perturbations for the stabilization of unstable periodic orbits embedded in a chaotic attractor. The idea that chaotic behavior may be controlled by small perturbations of physical parameters allows this kind of behavior to be desirable in different applications. In this work, chaos control is performed employing a variable structure controller. The approach is based on the sliding mode control strategy and enhanced by an adaptive fuzzy algorithm to cope with modeling inaccuracies. The convergence properties of the closed-loop system are analytically proven using Lyapunov’s direct method and Barbalat’s lemma. As an application of the control procedure, a nonlinear pendulum dynamics is investigated. Numerical results are presented in order to demonstrate the control system performance. A comparison between the stabilization of general orbits and unstable periodic orbits embedded in chaotic attractor is carried out showing that the chaos control can confer flexibility to the system by changing the response with low power consumption.