Design of Active Disturbance Rejection Controller Variants for Solar Tracker System

Abstract

In this paper, two controller design techniques such as linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) and generalized active disturbance rejection control (GADRC) are proposed for solar tracker system. The merit of the proposed method is that there is no need of tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) parameters which is normally done in existing PID controller design techniques. As, the soft computing PID-based techniques involve very large iterations, so they consume much time. Also, these techniques are computationally inefficient. Therefore, to get rid of the conventional PID controller design topology, the LADRC scheme is proposed, which requires very few information of the system and even then the performance of the controller is impressive. The performance of the controller is further improved via GADRC scheme by including complete information of the system. Next, the robustness of proposed methods is investigated by the presence of system parametric uncertainty. Further, the performance of the proposed controllers is checked under time delays. Simulation results reveal that the proposed methods exhibit superb capability of disturbance rejection, high robustness and excellent transient performance in the presence of time delay in comparison to numerous existing PID-based control techniques.