Disturbance attenuation and rejection for systems with nonlinearity via DOBC approach

In this paper the disturbance attenuation and rejection problem is investigated for a class of MIMO nonlinear systems in the disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC) framework. The unknown external disturbances are supposed to be generated by an exogenous system, where some classic assumptions on disturbances can be removed. Two kinds of nonlinear dynamics in the plants are considered, respectively, which correspond to the known and unknown functions. Design schemes are presented for both the full-order and reduced-order disturbance observers via LMI-based algorithms. For the plants with known nonlinearity, it is shown that the full-order observer can be constructed by augmenting the estimation of disturbances into the full-state estimation, and the reduced-order ones can be designed by using of the separation principle. For the uncertain nonlinearity, the problem can be reduced to a robust observer design problem. By integrating the disturbance observers with conventional control laws, the disturbances can be rejected and the desired dynamic performances can be guaranteed. If the disturbance also has perturbations, it is shown that the proposed approaches are infeasible and further research is required in the future. Finally, simulations for a flight control system is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the results. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.