Improved Active Disturbance Rejection-Based Decentralized Control for MIMO Nonlinear Systems: Comparison with The Decoupled Control Scheme

A decentralized control scheme is developed in this paper based on an improved active disturbance rejection control (IADRC) for output tracking of square Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) nonlinear systems and compared with the decoupled control scheme. These nonlinear MIMO systems were subjected to exogenous disturbances and composed of high couplings between subsystems, input couplings, and uncertain elements. In the decentralized control scheme, it was assumed that the input couplings and subsystem couplings were both parts of the generalized disturbance. Moreover, the generalized disturbance included other components, such as exogenous disturbances and system uncertainties, and it was estimated within the context of Active Disturbance rejection Control (ADRC) via a novel nonlinear higher order extended state observer (NHOESO) from the measured output and canceled from the input channel in a real-time fashion. Then, based on the designed NHOESO, a separate feedback control law was developed for each subsystem to achieve accurate output tracking for given reference input. With the proposed decentralized control scheme, the square MIMO nonlinear system was converted into approximately separate linear time invariant Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) subsystems. Numerical simulations in a MATLAB environment showed the effectiveness of the proposed technique, where it was applied on a hypothetical MIMO nonlinear system with strong couplings and vast uncertainties. The proposed decentralized control scheme reduced the total control signal energy by 20.8% as compared to the decoupled control scheme using Conventional ADRC (CADRC), while the reduction was 27.18% using the IADRC.