A generalized disturbance observer theory and application to control of the GoldStar DD robot arm

There have been many approaches to solve the disturbance rejection problem in the control of LTI systems with state independent disturbances or possibly nonlinear state dependent disturbances. From the view point of each actuator, robot manipulators can be modeled as the second class of systems. With this model, M.Nakao et al. [1] introduced a decentralized control scheme based on interference estimation which is simple in its implementation and robust to the coupled dynamics and parameter variations. This paper systematically generalizes the control scheme to arbitrary finite dimensional LTI systems with disturbances. In doing so, we develop a disturbance observer theory for solving the disturbance rejection problem. We also present a discrete version of the theory with discussion of sampling and time-delay effects.