Title: Active Disturbance Rejection Control
From an Enduring Idea to an Emerging Technology
Speaker: Zhiqiang Gao
Time: 09:00-11:00 am, May 17, 2017
Location: Meeting Room C317, School of IoT Engineering
Abstract:
In this talk the audience goes on a tour of history spanning past centuries and witnesses how an obscure, yet timeless, idea zip crossed East and West, past and present, leading to an industrial control technology recently adopted by industry giants such as Texas Instruments, Freescale, and Parker etc. The deep root of the idea takes us to the beginning of the Chinese civilization, in the time of HuangDi and the invention of the South-pointing Chariot; to the 19th Century Frenchman J.V. Poncelet’s invention of isochronous governor, and its continuation in the form of the Invariance Principle in the then Soviet Union in 1930-60s; and, finally, to the active disturbance rejection control of 1990s by the Chinese scholar Jingqing Han. In the modern control era, this idea has continued to manifest itself in various engineering solutions and academic studies, such various disturbance observer based designs and the so called model free control designs, particularly in the recent work of Michel Fliess and his followers. It is argued that there is a fundamentally intrinsic principle behind all these seemingly distinct methods, i.e. the principle of active disturbance rejection. Various engineering case studies are shown, together with the important and exciting new research directions. Emerging from the studies of ADRC is the framework of a new kind of control theory that transcends the existing territories such as robust control, adaptive control, linear and nonlinear control, etc. It fundamentally challenges the premise of the modern control theory as a branch of applied mathematics. Today, for every scholar and student devoted to the science of automatic control, Prof. Han’s question can be ignored no longer: Control theory, is it a theory of model or a theory of control? It was this question that eventually gave birth to ADRC! Understanding it will give us the key to unlock ADRC.
Biography:
Prof. Zhiqiang Gao received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1990 and has taught at Cleveland State University ever since. Faced with ever widening chasm between control theory and practice, Dr. Gao returned to the roots of controls by collaborating extensively with engineers at NASA and industry in solving real world problems, from which the foundation and authenticity of research were rebuilt. Collaborating with Prof. Jingqing Han, Dr. Gao has worked quietly on active disturbance rejection control for twenty years, nurturing it from its early, conceptual stage to a maturing and emerging industrial control technology. In doing so, he made an obscure idea clear and established firmly a general design principle in dealing with uncertainties in industrial settings, often with staggering improvements in performance and energy savings. Asking basic, rudimentary question in research and in teaching, Dr. Gao and his team find creativity in practice and vitality in education.
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