A Sampled-Data Approach to Nonlinear ESO-Based Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Pneumatic Muscle Actuator Systems with Actuator Saturations

In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control scheme with a nonlinear sampled-data extended state observer (NSESO) is proposed for a pneumatic muscle actuator (PMA) system. The phenomenon of the actuator saturation is taken into account in the design procedure. The NSESO is utilized to estimate the so-called total disturbance that reflects the aggregated impacts of unmodeled nonlinearities and disturbances. Then, an NSESO-based composite control strategy is designed, where the estimates provided by the designed NSESO serve as the compensation to eliminate the total disturbance. Finally, a number of practical experiments on the PMA systems are conducted to verify the validity and applicability of the proposed design method.