Predictive Extended State Observer-Based Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Systems with Time Delay

The latest research on disturbance rejection mechanisms has shown active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) to be an effective controller for uncertainties and nonlinear dynamics embedded in systems to be controlled. The significance of the ADRC controller is its model-free nature, as it requires minimal knowledge of the system model. In addition, it can actively estimate and compensate for the impact of internal and external disturbances present, with the aid of its crucial subsystem called the extended state observer (ESO). However, ADRC controller design becomes more challenging owing to different system disturbances, such as output disturbances, measurement noise, and varying time-delays persistent in the system's communication channels. Most disturbance rejection techniques aim to reduce internal perturbations and external disturbances (input and output disturbance). However, output disturbance rejection with measurement noise under time-delay control is still a challenging problem. This paper presents a novel predictive ESO-based ADRC controller for time-delay systems by employing predictive methods to compensate for the disturbances originating from time delay. The prediction mechanism of the novel (proposed) controller design is greatly attributed to the extended state predictor observer (ESPO) integrated with the delay-based ADRC inside the proposed controller method. Thus, the proposed controller can predict the unknown system dynamics generated during the delay and compensate for these dynamics via disturbance rejection under time-delay control. This approach uses the optimization mechanism to determine controller parameters, where the genetic algorithm (GA) is employed with the integral of time-weighted absolute error (ITAE) as the fitness function. The proposed controller is validated by controlling second-order systems with time delay. Type 0, Type 1, and Type 2 systems are considered as the controlled plants, with disturbances (unknown dynamics due to delay and external disturbance), along with measurement noise present. The proposed controller method is compared with state-of-the-art methods, such as the modified time-delay-based ADRC method and the ESPO-based controller method. The findings indicate that the method proposed in this paper outperforms its existing competitors by compensating for the dynamics during the time delay and shows robust behaviour, improved disturbance rejection, and a fair extent of resilience to noise.