A two stage Active Disturbance Rejection Control design for under-actuated nonlinear systems

Abstract

A two-stage Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) design procedure is presented for the output trajectory tracking control problem in Single Input Single Output (SISO) nonlinear systems. Aside from the given scalar system output, the plant is assumed to exhibit a second, physically measurable, internal scalar output variable. The system output is controlled in an ADRC manner from an implicit static, or dynamic, nonlinear feedback controller using, in general, a nonlinear differential expression of the internal output variable. A desired internal output trajectory is thus generated. The internal output variable, in turn, is controlled from the original input and forced to track the desired trajectory synthesized in the previous step by the auxiliary controller. Each ADRC controller design is based on a simplified model of the corresponding subsystem, usually relegating interaction variables and additive nonlinearities to be part of a local (total) disturbance input term. The control scheme is reduced to a set of linear ADRC controllers with, possibly, cancellation of nonlinear input gains which are assumed to be known. Two illustrative aerospace examples are presented where the proposed procedure is illustrated via digital computer simulations.