The active disturbance rejection and sliding mode control approach to the stabilization of the Euler–Bernoulli beam equation with boundary input disturbance

In this paper, we are concerned with the boundary feedback stabilization of a one-dimensional Euler–Bernoulli beam equation with the external disturbance flowing to the control end. The active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) and sliding mode control (SMC) are adopted in investigation. By the ADRC approach, the disturbance is estimated through an extended state observer and canceled online by the approximated one in the closed-loop. It is shown that the external disturbance can be attenuated in the sense that the resulting closed-loop system under the extended state feedback tends to any arbitrary given vicinity of zero as the time goes to infinity. In the second part, we use the SMC to reject the disturbance by removing the condition in ADRC that the derivative of the disturbance is supposed to be bounded. The existence and uniqueness of the solution for the closed-loop via SMC are proved, and the monotonicity of the “reaching condition” is presented without the differentiation of the sliding mode function, for which it may not always exist for the weak solution of the closed-loop system. The numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of both methods.