Active disturbance rejection adaptive control of uncertain nonlinear systems: theory and application

This paper proposes an active disturbance rejection adaptive controller for tracking control of a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with consideration of both parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities by effectively integrating adaptive control with extended state observer via backstepping method. Parametric uncertainties are handled by the synthesized adaptive law and the remaining uncertainties are estimated by extended state observer and then compensated in a feedforward way. Moreover, both matched uncertainties and unmatched uncertainties can be estimated by constructing an extended state observer for each channel of the considered nonlinear plant. Since parametric uncertainties can be reduced by parameter adaptation, the learning burden of extended state observer is much reduced. Consequently, high-gain feedback is avoided and improved tracking performance can be expected. The proposed controller theoretically guarantees a prescribed transient tracking performance and final tracking accuracy in general while achieving asymptotic tracking when the uncertain nonlinearities are not time-variant. The motion control of a motor-driven robot manipulator is investigated as an application example with some suitable modifications and improvements, and comparative simulation results are obtained to verify the high tracking performance nature of the proposed control strategy.