Unified Disturbance-Estimation-Based Control and Equivalence With IMC and PID: Case Study on a DC-DC Boost Converter

In the context of disturbance-estimation (DE)-based control, it is reported that including desired dynamics into the nominal model yields a simple and compact control law that is easier to implement. The resulting control structure unifies the nominal feedback controller and feed-forward disturbance compensator to formulate an overall feed-forward disturbance compensation problem. Based on this, two popular DE-based techniques, namely active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) and uncertainty and disturbance estimator (UDE)-based control, are restructured into a unified form. By reformulating the controllers in the frequency domain, it is shown that the two structures are equivalent provided the UDE filter is selected based on the observer designed for ADRC. For an easier understanding of practitioners who are familiar with the conventional control structures, the designed controllers are reinterpreted in the framework of two-degree-of-freedom (2DoF) internal model control and 2DoF proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to show the equivalence among them. Tuning rules for PID controllers in terms of unified ADRC parameters are also presented to aid practical implementation in industry. Performance of the unified control scheme is evaluated on a non-minimum phase dc-dc boost converter that is operating under line and load disturbances using simulation and experimental study.