Extension of the Observability Rank Condition to Time-Varying Nonlinear Systems

This article provides an extension of the observability rank condition to time-varying nonlinear systems. Previous conditions to check the state observability only hold for nonlinear systems that do not explicitly depend on time, or, for time-varying systems, they only account for the linear case. In this article, a general analytic condition is provided. The new condition reduces to the well-known observability rank condition in the two simpler cases of time-varying linear systems and time-invariant nonlinear systems. The proposed condition is applied to aerospace robotics to study the observability of a lunar-module-type system equipped with monocular vision and inertial sensors.