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Active disturbance rejection control: between the formulation in time and the understanding in frequency

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Abstract

With the rapid deployments of the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) as a bonafide industrial technology in the background, this paper summarizes some recent results in the analysis of linear ADRC and offers explanations in the frequency response language with which practicing engineers are familiar. Critical to this endeavor is the concept of bandwidth, which has been used in a more general sense. It is this concept that can serve as the link between the otherwise opaque state space formulation of the ADRC and the command design considerations and concerns shared by practicing engineers. The remarkable characteristics of a simple linear ADRC was first shown in the frequency domain, followed by the corresponding analysis in time domain, where the relationship between the tracking error and the ADRC bandwidth is established. It is shown that such insight is only possible by using the method of solving linear differential equations, instead of the more traditional techniques such as the Lyapunov methods, which tend to be more conservative and difficult to grasp by engineers. The insight obtained from such analysis is further demonstrated in the simulation validation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gannon University, Erie, PA, 16541, USA

    Qing Zheng

  2. Center for Advanced Control Technologies, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, 44115, USA

    Zhiqiang Gao

Authors
  1. Qing Zheng
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  2. Zhiqiang Gao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qing Zheng.

Additional information

Qing ZHENG is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Gannon University, received the Doctor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from Cleveland State University in 2009. Before joining Gannon University, she had been employed at Beijing Institute of Control Devices in China for five years. Her research interests include active disturbance rejection control and its applications as well as multivariable control and optimization. E-mail: zheng003@gannon.edu.

Zhiqiang GAO received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Notre Dame in 1990. He is an associate professor and the director of Center for Advanced Control Technologies, Cleveland State University, His research is focused on the principles and practice of engineering cybernetics, particularly its manifestation in active disturbance rejection control. E-mail: z.gao@ieee.org.

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Zheng, Q., Gao, Z. Active disturbance rejection control: between the formulation in time and the understanding in frequency. Control Theory Technol. 14, 250–259 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-016-6059-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-016-6059-9

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