This book basically gathers the material of the 28th Grenoble International
Summer School on Control, dedicated to ”Nonlinear observers and applications”,
organized within the Control Systems Department (former Laboratoire
d’Automatique de Grenoble) of the newly formed GIPSA-lab research center, and
hosted by the ”Maison Jean Kuntzmann” of the IMAG Institute, in September
2007.
The motivation for this school and the present book is twofold: on the one
hand, the observer problem is undoubtedly crucial in control systems, and on
the other hand there are not so many comprehensive documents on this topic.
The present one does not claim to be exhaustive, but can give a good idea on the
problem, on the possible tools to get solutions, and on various applications. Its
spirit basically follows from the pioneering studies which took place in particular
in Grenoble in the early eighties, and the subsequent developments, owing a
lot to Guy Bornard and his coworkers. In particular, a general overview on
observer tools for nonlinear systems is here proposed, focuses on high gain and
adaptive gain techniques are given, as well as immersion and optimization-based
approaches. Some applications in control and fault or parameter estimation are
finally discussed.