A guide to design disturbance observer

The goal of this paper is to clarify the robustness and performance constraints in the design of control systems based on disturbance observer (DOB). Although the bandwidth constraints of a DOB have long been very well-known by experiences and observations, they have not been formulated and clearly reported yet. In this regard, the Bode and Poisson integral formulas are utilized in the robustness analysis so that the bandwidth constraints of a DOB are derived analytically. In this paper, it is shown that the bandwidth of a DOB has upper and lower bounds to obtain a good robustness if the plant has nonminimum phase zero(s) and pole(s), respectively. Besides that the performance of a system can be improved by using a higher order disturbance observer (HODOB); however, the robustness may deteriorate, and the bandwidth constraints become more severe. New analysis and design methods, which provide good robustness and predefined performance criteria, are proposed for the DOB based robust control systems. The validity of the proposals is verified by simulation results.