Implementation of Linear Active Disturbance Rejection Control for a DC Motor System

DC motors can be suitably chosen for industrial, medical or robotic applications because of their ability to supply continuous stable current and high efficiency. Speed control is the essential part of the DC motor applications. Model based conventional control techniques suffer performance losses under varying system parameters or changing operating points. Model independent adaptive control techniques have been developed to overcome this problem. But due to mathematical complexity involved, implementation of these techniques require high processing power. Linear Active Disturbance Rejection Controller (LADRC) is a promising technique providing robustness with a simpler structure suitable for practical applications. LADRC achieves this through a Linear Extended State Observer (LESO) included in its structure. In this study LADRC is applied to speed control problem of a DC motor. Performance of the designed LADRC is compared with that of a conventional PID controller using an experimental setup. Superiority on LADRC is verified by performance indices of ITSE, ITAE, IAE and ISE.