PSO-Based Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Position Control of Magnetic Levitation System

In the present work, design and analysis of Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) method has been presented for control and disturbance rejection of magnetic levitation (Maglev) system. Based on the structure of ADRC, two controllers are considered for the control purpose suggested system: Linear ADRC (LADRC) and Nonlinear ADRC (NADRC). A performance comparison has been made between LADRC and NADRC in terms of robustness against variation of parameters and the capability to reject applied disturbance. The main difficulty with ADRC is the necessity to tune its constituent parameters. Particle Swarm Optimization Method (PSO) has been suggested to tune the parameters of ADRC to have minimum error variance such to enhance the dynamic performance of the controlled system. The results based on MATLAB simulation indicated that LADRC gives better robustness characteristics than NADRC. Also, it has been reported that the LADRC has better disturbance rejection capabilities than NADRC when prescribed disturbing force is applied on the ball mass.