Simultaneous state and unknown input reconstruction using cascaded high-gain observers

This paper presents a systematic routine for jointly reconstruct the state variables and the unknown inputs (UIs) for a large class of nonlinear MIMO systems. After an appropriate change of state coordinates, a set of cascade high-gain observers (CHGO) are designed in such a way that each of them provides an estimation of only one component of the UI vector, except the last one which gives a final adjustment of the whole state variables. Such design achieves a boundary of the state estimation error which can be arbitrarily small by properly specifying the sole synthesis parameter. An illustrative example verifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.