Active Disturbance Rejection Control for MEMS Gyroscopes

A new control method is presented to drive the drive axis of a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) gyroscope to resonance and to regulate the output amplitude of the axis to a fixed level. It is based on a unique active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy, which actively estimates and compensates for internal dynamic changes of the drive axis and external disturbances in real time. The stability analysis shows that both the estimation error and the tracking error of the drive axis output are bounded and that the upper bounds of the errors monotonously decrease with the increase of the controller bandwidth. The control system is simulated and tested using a field-programmable-gate-array-based digital implementation on a piezoelectric vibrational gyroscope. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed controller not only drives the drive axis to vibrate along the desired trajectory but also compensates for manufacture imperfections in a robust fashion that makes the performance of the gyroscope insensitive to parameter variations and noises. Such robustness, the fact that the control design does not require an accurate plant model, and the ease of implementation make the proposed solution practical and economic for industrial applications.