Adaptive high-gain observers for systems in observability canonical form

This paper deals with the problem of designing observers for nonlinear systems in observability canonical without having at one's disposal a model for the underlying dynamics. Such an objective is pursued by coupling the classical highgain observer structure with several different adaptation laws borrowed from the adaptive control literature. The overall architecture is demonstrated to accomplish the set goal under rather standard assumptions. Some numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed observer.