In recent years, with the ever increasing penetration of wind generation, great concerns have been raised since the constantly decline of system's inertia may considerably deteriorate the frequency stability of power system. In this regard, an inertial response control technique is proposed to enable wind generators to provide the power system with controlled inertia in need via releasing energy to or absorbing energy from the system. In this paper, an extended state observer (ESO)-based inertia emulation controller (InEC) is proposed for doubly-fed induction generators (DFIGs), which is shown to be robust to measurement noise and changing working conditions. In addition, to mitigate potential adverse impacts of rotor speed recovery control (RSRC) of DFIGs on system frequency, an ESO-based RSRC is derived, allowing a schedulable dynamic of speed recovery. Experiments carried out on a power hardware-in-loop testbed manifest that the proposed controllers outperform the traditional proportional–differential type InEC and proportional–integral type RSRC in performance and robustness.