A new model reference adaptive control with the disturbance observer‐based adaptation law for the Nonlinear Servomechanisms: SISO and MIMO Systems

Abstract

AbstractA disturbance observer (DOB) is proposed to replace the external disturbance adaptation law in model reference adaptive control (MRAC) to perform robust tracking control performance for nonlinear servomechanisms. Lyapunov stable theory is implemented to combine the DOB with MRAC to simultaneously converge the estimated states and tracking errors toward null. Then, the disturbance observer‐based MRAC (DOBMRAC) is proposed and realized. The single‐input single‐output (SISO) mass‐spring‐damper system and multi‐input multi‐output (MIMO) two‐link manipulator robot system are both demonstrated as the control examples. However, in comparisons of tracking control performance between MRAC and DOBMRAC, it is found that the proposed controller reveals better robust tracking control performance for SISO and MIMO servomechanisms with unknown time‐varying disturbances. The contributions of this paper are: i) the proposed DOBMRAC is successfully implemented in both the SISO and MIMO systems; ii) the proposed controller performs better tracking control performance than MRAC for unknown time‐varying disturbances; iii) the DOBMRAC cannot only perform robust tracking control performance, but also shows disturbance estimation ability well; and iv) the proposed control methodology can also be widely applied to other MRAC systems with unknown time‐varying disturbance.