Interval Observer Design for Nonlinear Systems: Stability Radii Approach

This paper presents a new approach to design preserving order and interval observers for a family of nonlinear systems in absence and in presence of parametric uncertainties and exogenous disturbances. A preserving order observer provides an upper/lower estimation that is always above/below the state trajectory, depending on the partial ordering of the initial conditions, and asymptotically converges to its true values in the nominal case. An interval observer is then constituted by means of an upper and a lower preserving order observer. In the uncertain/disturbed case, the estimations preserve the partial ordering with respect to the state trajectory, and practically converge to the true values, despite of the uncertainties/perturbations. The design approach relies on the cooperativity property and the stability radii mathematical tools, both applied to the estimation error systems. The objective is to exploit the stability radii analysis for the family of linear positive systems under the time-varying nonlinear perturbations in order to guarantee the exponential convergence property of the observers, while the cooperativity condition determines the partial ordering between the trajectories of the state and the estimations. The proposed approach, defined for Lipschitz nonlinearities, depends only on two observer matrix gains. The design is reduced to the solution of linear matrix inequalities, which are given by the cooperative condition and convergence constraints. An illustrative example is presented to show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.