Series of ARAS Scientific Workshops – Nonlinear Observers: Methods and Application

In this workshop we review design of observers for nonlinear systems. Observers are essential for feedback control of systems when not all the states are available. Although this necessity motivates the researcher to develop several efficient techniques to estimate the dynamic behavior of systems, the application of observers are not limited to state feedback design. Different estimators, and estimation techniques are developed in this field and applied for a variety of industrial application including system performance monitoring, system dynamic perdition, fault diagnosis and tolerance, etc. In this workshop an introduction to this vast area of research is given. First, a review on linear observer designs are given, and the optimal Kalman filter formulation is introduced. Then the use of this design for linearized system is given, and the design is generalized to extended Kalman filter (EKF) with variable observer gain. Finally the design of nonlinear observer for known and uncertain system is elaborated, and high gain observers are described. Some example and applications are introduced for better comprehension of the theoretical developments.