AbstractThis article puts forward an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) based tuning rule to the well‐known proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) control for a class of multi‐input multi‐output non‐affine uncertain systems. It is proved that the PID control with the ADRC‐based tuning rule can guarantee satisfied tracking performance, both for the transient phase and the steady state. Furthermore, it is illustrated that, with the new tuning rule, the PID control is able to timely estimate and compensate for the nonlinear and coupled uncertainties, which explains the reason why PID control does have large‐scale robustness with respect to the uncertainties and can achieve decoupling control with a simple structure. The theoretical results are verified by simulations.