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Actuators
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Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced...
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Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced Actuation Systems

A special issue of Actuators (ISSN 2076-0825). This special issue belongs to the section "Control Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2026 | Viewed by 1365

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Yan Wu

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Guest Editor
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
Interests: adaptive control of nonlinear dynamical systems; active disturbance rejection control; differential algebraic systems; digital signal processing
Prof. Dr. Seenith Sivasundaram

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mathematics, Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, USA
Interests: fractional differential equations; integral boundary conditions; Banach contraction principle; dynamical systems; fractional-order systems; delay differential equations; mathematical modelling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Thomas Yang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114-3900, USA
Interests: adaptive/statistical signal processing; independent component analysis; wireless communications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The growing complexity of modern engineering systems demands robust control strategies capable of maintaining performance in the presence of uncertainties, nonlinearities, and external disturbances. Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) has emerged as a powerful, model-independent control framework that achieves this by estimating and actively compensating for total disturbances in real time. Over the past two decades, ADRC has seen significant theoretical advancements and a broadening range of applications, spanning robotics, power systems, process control, aerospace, and biomedical systems. Recent research has emphasized improved observer and controller design, stability and robustness analysis, tuning methodologies, and the integration of ADRC with data-driven or AI-enhanced techniques. Practical implementations have also addressed challenges related to digital realization, sensor limitations, and real-time computational efficiency.

This Special Issue aims to showcase original research and review articles that reflect the state of the art in ADRC, highlighting new theoretical developments, practical innovations, and application-driven studies. We welcome contributions that advance the understanding or implementation of ADRC across diverse domains, including both simulation-based and experimental work. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, observer design, control synthesis, tuning strategies, hybrid methods, robustness analysis, and emerging applications. Papers exploring interdisciplinary approaches or novel uses of ADRC in challenging control scenarios are particularly encouraged.

Dr. Yan Wu
Prof. Dr. Seenith Sivasundaram
Dr. Thomas Yang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Actuators is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • extended state observer
  • nonlinear control
  • bandwidth parametrization
  • error feedback control
  • dynamic compensation
  • robustness
  • model independence
  • decoupling
  • tracking differentiator

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 1303 KB  
Article
Steady-State Disturbance-Rejection Controllability for LTI Systems with Rigid-Body Mode
by Haemin Lee and Jinseong Park
Actuators 2025, 14(12), 589; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14120589 - 3 Dec 2025
Viewed by 222
Abstract
Controllability metrics based on system Gramians have been widely adopted to provide quantitative measures of the degree of controllability (DoC) and the disturbance rejection capability (DoDR) of dynamical systems. While steady-state Gramian formulations offer closed-form tractability, they are not applicable when rigid-body modes [...] Read more.
Controllability metrics based on system Gramians have been widely adopted to provide quantitative measures of the degree of controllability (DoC) and the disturbance rejection capability (DoDR) of dynamical systems. While steady-state Gramian formulations offer closed-form tractability, they are not applicable when rigid-body modes are present, as the associated poles at the origin cause the conventional Gramians to diverge. This paper presents a novel steady-state DoDR metric for linear time-invariant systems with a rigid-body mode. By block-diagonalizing the dynamics through a similarity transformation and analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the Gramian matrices, we derive an exact closed-form expression for the steady-state DoDR. The resulting formulation is numerically stable and enables systematic evaluation of disturbance-rejection capability even in the presence of a rigid-body mode. The proposed metric is validated using a mass–spring–damper chain model, where its effectiveness is demonstrated in actuator placement problems. The results show that the metric not only remains computationally well-posed but also provides physically meaningful interpretations consistent with modal characteristics. This study establishes a foundation for extending disturbance-rejection metrics to systems with multiple rigid-body modes, thereby broadening the applicability of Gramian-based controllability analysis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced Actuation Systems)
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20 pages, 12107 KB  
Article
Research on Cooperative Stabilization Control of Multi-Pointing-Mirror Laser Communication Terminals Based on GA-ADRC
by Lihui Wang, Lizhong Zhang, Lixin Meng and Yangyang Bai
Actuators 2025, 14(12), 571; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14120571 - 25 Nov 2025
Viewed by 265
Abstract
Aiming at the control challenges of strong nonlinearity, time-varying parameters and multi-channel disturbance coupling in multi-address laser communication networking caused by the common inertial reference of multi-directional mirror strapdown stabilized platforms, a genetic algorithm-optimized active disturbance rejection control (GA-ADRC) method is proposed. By [...] Read more.
Aiming at the control challenges of strong nonlinearity, time-varying parameters and multi-channel disturbance coupling in multi-address laser communication networking caused by the common inertial reference of multi-directional mirror strapdown stabilized platforms, a genetic algorithm-optimized active disturbance rejection control (GA-ADRC) method is proposed. By constructing a distributed active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) architecture and using genetic algorithms to globally and collaboratively optimize the observer gain and control parameters, the disturbance suppression and dynamic decoupling of multi-variable systems are effectively achieved. Experimental results show that under 0.1–0.3 Hz base disturbances, this method improves the line of sight (LOS) stabilization accuracy by 28–32%, with a standard deviation better than 14 μrad, significantly outperforming traditional PID control. This research not only provides a high-accuracy control solution that does not rely on precise models for multi-LOS cooperative stabilization but also offers a generalizable theoretical and practical framework for the intelligent control of complex optoelectronic systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced Actuation Systems)
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15 pages, 3491 KB  
Article
Gearless Coal Mill Anti-Disturbance Sliding Mode Control Based on Improved Deadbeat Predictive Current Control
by Qiming Wang, Mingduo Zhang and Changhong Jiang
Actuators 2025, 14(11), 554; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14110554 - 11 Nov 2025
Viewed by 245
Abstract
This paper presents a composite control strategy for gearless coal mill to improve the disturbance immunity under low-speed variable operating conditions. First, the gearless coal mill encounters power supply voltage fluctuations, mechanical failures, or ambient temperature changes during operation. These situations can cause [...] Read more.
This paper presents a composite control strategy for gearless coal mill to improve the disturbance immunity under low-speed variable operating conditions. First, the gearless coal mill encounters power supply voltage fluctuations, mechanical failures, or ambient temperature changes during operation. These situations can cause the system to suffer from the problem of insufficient control accuracy of the rotational speed. Therefore, a non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control strategy is proposed to improve the speed response. Then, to address the problem of load perturbation caused by different coal quality, this paper designs the extended state observer. Feed-forward compensation of the perturbation is performed to improve the robustness. Finally, due to the parameter mismatch problem caused by heat in operations that take a long time, this paper proposes a sliding-mode-based deadbeat predictive current control. The strategy possesses the fast dynamic response of deadbeat predictive current control while retaining the strong robustness of sliding mode control. Lyapunov proved the stability of the proposed control strategy. The experimental results verified that the proposed control strategy had better control performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced Actuation Systems)
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19 pages, 860 KB  
Article
Decentralized Disturbance Rejection Control of Triangularly Coupled Loop Thermosyphon System
by Novel Kumar Dey and Yan Wu
Actuators 2025, 14(11), 532; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14110532 - 1 Nov 2025
Viewed by 364
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the stability of a triangularly coupled triple-loop thermosyphon system with momentum and heat exchange at the coupling point as well as the existence of disturbances. The controller consists of a single, local-state feedback. From the stability analysis, we [...] Read more.
In this paper, we investigate the stability of a triangularly coupled triple-loop thermosyphon system with momentum and heat exchange at the coupling point as well as the existence of disturbances. The controller consists of a single, local-state feedback. From the stability analysis, we obtain explicit bounds on the feedback gains, which depend on the Rayleigh numbers and the momentum coupling parameter, but independent of the thermal coupling parameter. The existence of the stability bounds allows us to design decentralized adaptive controllers to automatically search for the feasible gains when the system parameters are unknown. In the case of existing disturbances in the system, we approximate the disturbances via an extended-state observer for the purpose of disturbance rejection. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed decentralized disturbance rejection controller design. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Active Disturbance Rejection Control: Theory, Design, and Applications in Advanced Actuation Systems)
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