An Application of Active Disturbance Rejection Control to Stepper Motors with Field Oriented Control

In this paper, an application of an Active Disturbance Rejection Controller (ADRC) to a hybrid stepper motor is presented. ADRC has gained the attention of practitioners due to its simplicity and robustness against model uncertainty and external disturbances compared to standard PID control. The performance of the Linear ADRC (LADRC) is addressed in this paper for a stepper motor under Field Oriented Control (FOC). First a simulation of current, speed and position control loops is performed, and after, a position reference step experiment is done in a real test bench. The results are systematically compared to the case of a PI controller showing improvements for the same given specifications. Also, a load torque observer (LTO) is added as feedforward to the PI controller for the experimental tests. Results show a better load rejection, setpoint tracking and repeatibility for the ADRC controller in hybrid stepper motors.