On Observer-Based Control of Nonlinear Systems

Abstract: Filtering and reconstruction of signals play a fundamental role in modern signal processing, telecommunications, and control theory and are used in numerous applications. The feedback principle is an important concept in control theory. Many different control strategies are based on the assumption that all internal states of the control object are available for feedback. In most cases, however, only a few of the states or some functions of the states can be measured. This circumstance raises the need for techniques, which makes it possible not only to estimate states, but also to derive control laws that guarantee stability when using the estimated states instead of the true ones. For linear systems, the separation principle assures stability for the use of converging state estimates in a stabilizing state feedback control law. In general, however, the combination of separately designed state observers and state feedback controllers does not preserve performance, robustness, or even stability of each of the separate designs. In this thesis, the problems of observer design and observer-based control for nonlinear systems are addressed. The deterministic continuous-time systems have been in focus. Stability analysis related to the Positive Real Lemma with relevance for output feedback control is presented. Separation results for a class of nonholonomic nonlinear systems, where the combination of independently designed observers and state-feedback controllers assures stability in the output tracking problem are shown. In addition, a generalization to the observer-backstepping method where the controller is designed with respect to estimated states, taking into account the effects of the estimation errors, is presented. Velocity observers with application to ship dynamics and mechanical manipulators are also presented.