On the convergence of an extended state observer for nonlinear systems with uncertainty

The extended state observer first proposed by Jingqing Han in [J.Q. Han, A class of extended state observers for uncertain systems, Control Decis. 10 (1) (1995) 8588 (in Chinese)] is the key link toward the active disturbance rejection control that is taking off as a technology after numerous successful applications in engineering. Unfortunately, there is no rigorous proof of convergence to date. In this paper, we attempt to tackle this long unsolved extraordinary problem. The main idea is to transform the error equation of objective system with its extended state observer into a asymptotical stable system with a small disturbance, for which the effect of total disturbance error is eliminated by the high-gain. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.