Event-triggered high-gain observer design for nonlinear systems

In this work, an event-triggered high gain observer (ET-HGO) design is considered for a continuous-time nonlinear system combined with disturbance and uncertainty. In the event-trigger scheme, the performance of the ET-HGO depends on the triggering condition directly. Hence, in this work, for the high-gain observer considered, an event-triggered transmission strategy, which does not relies on the other system state but the output of the control system, is proposed such that the observation error is asymptotically bounded. Further, with mild restriction, the observation error is guaranteed to be bounded all the time. The obtained theoretical results are evaluated through the numerical simulations.

1 Introduction

State estimation is among the most challenging problems in control system design. One recent state observer, named high-gain observer (HGO) proposed in [1], has been applied in a wide range of applications, e.g., electromagnetic valve actuator system [2], motion control system [3], rotary pendulum system [4] and so on [5]–[7]. The core idea is that with a sufficiently high gain parameter, the high-gain observer is able to present a satisfactory estimation of the system state. Not surprisingly, therefore, high-gain observer has remained high up on the control community in recent years, which can be witnessed through the literature concerning HGO (see, e.g., [8]–[10] and references therein). An indepth review of the developments of HGO was provided in [11].