Adaptive dynamic surface control using nonlinear disturbance observers for position tracking of electro-hydraulic servo systems

In this article, an adaptive dynamic surface control method with nonlinear disturbance observers is proposed for accurate position tracking of an electro-hydraulic servo system with unknown time-varying inner or external disturbances. The dynamic surface control approach adopted in the proposed controller is used to ameliorate the inherent complexity differentiation explosion of traditional backstepping method, which significantly simplifies the controller design process. The designed nonlinear disturbance observers are exploited to online estimate the inner or external disturbances of electro-hydraulic servo systems, and the performance degradation resulted from unknown time-varying disturbances is effectively suppressed. To further compensate for the system’s time-varying uncertain parameters, parameter adaptive updating laws are designed and combined in the proposed controller for accurate position tracking of electro-hydraulic servo systems. The closed-loop stability of the proposed controller is theoretically guaranteed by rigorous Lyapunov analysis. Comparative experimental results are carried out on a typical single-degree-of-freedom electro-hydraulic servo system, and the feasibility together with the superiority of the proposed controller is experimentally validated.