High-gain observer with sliding mode for nonlinear state estimation and fault reconstruction

This paper develops a high gain observer with multiple sliding modes for simultaneous state and fault estimations for MIMO nonlinear systems. The novelty lies in the observer design that employs the combination of high-gain observer and sliding mode observer. The proposed observer does not impose the small-Lipschitz-constant condition on the system nonlinearity. By imposing a structural assumption on the nonlinear fault distribution matrix, the observability of the faults/unknown inputs w.r.t. the outputs is safeguarded and sliding modes are utilized for their reconstruction. The reconstruction of the faults from the sliding mode only relies on the output estimation error and thus can be implemented online together with the state estimation. Finally, an application to flexible joint robotic arm is used to illustrate the proposed method.