Novel Active Disturbance Rejection Control Based on Nested Linear Extended State Observers

In this paper, a Novel Active Disturbance Rejection Control (N-ADRC) strategy is proposed that replaces the Linear Extended State Observer (LESO) used in Conventional ADRC (C-ADRC) with a nested LESO. In the nested LESO, the inner-loop LESO actively estimates and eliminates the generalized disturbance. Increasing the bandwidth improves the estimation accuracy which may tolerate noise and conflict with H/W limitations and the sampling frequency of the system. Therefore, an alternative scenario is offered without increasing the bandwidth of the inner-loop LESO provided that the rate of change of the generalized disturbance estimation error is upper bounded. This was achieved by the placing of an outer-loop LESO in parallel with the inner one that estimates and eliminates the remaining generalized disturbance originating from the inner-loop LESO due to bandwidth limitations. The stability of LESO and nested LESO was investigated using Lyapunov stability analysis. Simulations on uncertain nonlinear single-input-single-output (SISO) system with time-varying exogenous disturbance revealed that the proposed nested LESO could successfully deal with a generalized disturbance in both noisy and noise-free environments, where the Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE) of the tracking error for the nested LESO was reduced by 69.87% from that of the LESO.