Improved active disturbance rejection control for an autonomous vehicle following system

Spacing distance control for an autonomous vehicle-following system is studied in this paper. An improved active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) technique is proposed. The extended state observer (ESO) in traditional ADRC is replaced by a predictive extended state observer (PESO), which is used to estimate virtual disturbance, i.e., the total effect caused by unmodeled dynamics and internal/external disturbances. A confidence function is proposed to describe the reliability of the PESO. A controller based on the PESO is designed to suppress virtual disturbance and maintain system stability around equilibrium. Based on the proposed method, spacing distance control for a vehicle- following system is modeled as a single-input single-output linear time invariant system with disturbance. The stability of the PESO is analyzed with the prescribed H∞ attenuation level. The simulation results also show the effectiveness of the proposed method.