Disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC) and related methods have been researched and applied in various industrial sectors in the last four decades. This survey, at first time, gives a systematic and comprehensive tutorial and summary on the existing disturbance/uncertainty estimation and attenuation techniques, most notably, DOBC, active disturbance rejection control, disturbance accommodation control, and composite hierarchical antidisturbance control. In all of these methods, disturbance and uncertainty are, in general, lumped together, and an observation mechanism is employed to estimate the total disturbance. This paper first reviews a number of widely used linear and nonlinear disturbance/uncertainty estimation techniques and then discusses and compares various compensation techniques and the procedures of integrating disturbance/uncertainty compensation with a (predesigned) linear/nonlinear controller. It also provides concise tutorials of the main methods in this area with clear descriptions of their features. The application of this group of methods in various industrial sections is reviewed, with emphasis on the commercialization of some algorithms. The survey is ended with the discussion of future directions.

This paper develops a sliding-mode control (SMC) approach for systems with mismatched uncertainties via a nonlinear disturbance observer (DOB). By designing a novel sliding surface based on the disturbance estimation, a DOB-based SMC method is developed in this paper to counteract the mismatched disturbance. The newly proposed method exhibits the following two attractive features. First, the switching gain is only required to be designed greater than the bound of the disturbance estimation error rather than that of the disturbance; thus, the chattering problem is substantially alleviated. Second, the proposed method retains its nominal performance, which means the proposed method acts the same as the baseline sliding-mode controller in the absence of uncertainties. Simulation results of both the numerical and application examples show that the proposed method exhibits much better control performance than the baseline SMC and the integral SMC (I-SMC) methods, such as reduced chattering and nominal performance recovery.

The standard extended state observer based control (ESOBC) method is only applicable for a class of single-input-single-output essential-integral-chain systems with matched uncertainties. It is noticed that systems with nonintegral-chain form and mismatched uncertainties are more general and widely exist in practical engineering systems, where the standard ESOBC method is no longer available. To this end, it is imperative to explore new ESOBC approach for these systems to extend its applicability. By appropriately choosing a disturbance compensation gain, a generalized ESOBC (GESOBC) method is proposed for nonintegral-chain systems subject to mismatched uncertainties without any coordinate transformations. The proposed method is able to extend to multi-input-multi-output systems with almost no modification. Both numerical and application design examples demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed method.

This note investigates the finite-time attitude control problems for a single spacecraft and multiple spacecraft. First of all, a finite-time controller is designed to solve finite-time attitude tracking problem for a single spacecraft. Rigorous proof shows that the desired attitude can be tracked in finite time in the absence of disturbances. In the presence of disturbances, the tracking errors can reach a region around the origin in finite time. Then, based on the neighbor rule, a distributed finite-time attitude control law is proposed for a group of spacecraft with a leader-follower architecture. Under the finite-time control law, the attitude synchronization can be achieved in finite time.

The speed regulation problem for permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) servo system is studied in this paper. In order to optimize the control performance of the PMSM servo system, the predictive functional control (PFC) method is introduced in the control design of speed loop. The PFC-based speed control design consists of two steps. A simplified model is employed to predict the future q -axis current of PMSM. Then, an optimal control law is obtained by minimizing a quadratic performance index. However, it is noted that the standard PFC method does not achieve a satisfying effect in the presence of strong disturbances. To this end, an improved PFC method, called the PFC+ESO method, is developed. It introduces extended state observer (ESO) to estimate the lumped disturbances and adds a feedforward compensation item based on the estimated disturbances to the PFC speed controller. Simulation and experiment comparisons are made for these PFC methods and proportional-integral method with antiwindup control method to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.