High gain observer for a class of non-triangular systems

This paper presents a high gain observer for a class of MIMO nonlinear systems involving some uncertainties. The latter is particularly composed of cascade subsystems where each subsystem is associated with a subset of the output variables, and assumes a triangular dependence on its own state variables and may depend on the state variables of all other subsystems. The main contribution consists in extending the available results to allow more interconnections between the subsystems. Of fundamental interest, it is shown that the underlying observation error exponentially converges to zero in the absence of uncertainties. Moreover, the observation error can be made as small as desired by properly specifying the observer design parameter in the case where uncertainties are considered. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.