Neural-ESO: A Dual-Pathway Architecture for Provably Robust Learning-Based Control
For control systems requiring disturbance rejection, Neural-ESO provides a principled way to integrate learning with classical control, ensuring stability guarantees while leveraging neural network performance.
The paper introduces Neural-ESO, a dual-pathway architecture combining a neural network for feedforward disturbance estimation with a conventional ESO for error correction, achieving provably robust control. On a quadrotor landing task, it demonstrates improved accuracy-robustness trade-off and operational reliability over state-of-the-art baselines.
A learning-enabled disturbance-rejection framework based on a Neural Extended State Observer (Neural-ESO) is presented in this letter. Unlike existing learning-based control methods that largely rely on the learned model once deployed, Neural-ESO adopts a dual-pathway architecture: a predictive pathway uses a neural network to provide a feedforward disturbance estimate that accelerates convergence, while a corrective pathway employs a conventional ESO to compensate prediction errors and prevent over-reliance on the neural component. Using Lyapunov theory and a small-gain analysis, we show that enforcing a Lipschitz bound on the learning component guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop error dynamics. The proposed framework is validated on a quadrotor landing task subject to strong ground-effect disturbances across normal and out-of-distribution scenarios, demonstrating accuracy-robustness trade-off and greater operational reliability during training, deployment, and transfer compared with state-of-the-art baselines.