Disturbance Observer for Non-minimum Phase Linear Systems

Disturbance observer (DOB) approach has been widely employed in the industry thanks to its powerful ability to attenuate disturbances and compensate plant uncertainties. Motivated by the fact that the application of the DOB approach has been limited to minimum phase systems, we propose a new DOB configuration for non-minimum phase systems. Rigorous analysis for robust stability and performance recovery is presented in terms of a new filter $\Theta$(s). By restricting the plant uncertainty to a multiplicative perturbation, we also present a systematic design methodology for the filter $\Theta$(s) by virtue of the $H_{\infty}$ synthesis technique. An illustrative example of autopilot design is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for which it is not easy to design $H_{\infty}$ controller to achieve some control goals. The simulation results show that the response of the perturbed system in the presence of disturbance can be recovered to the nominal system response in the absence of disturbance.