Interval State Estimation for a Class of Nonlinear Systems

The goal of this technical note is to design interval observers for a class of nonlinear continuous-time systems. The first part of this work shows that it is usually possible to design an interval observer for linear systems by means of linear time-invariant changes of coordinates even if the system is not cooperative. This result is extended to a class of nonlinear systems using partial exact linearisations. The proposed observers guarantee to enclose the set of system states that is consistent with the model, the disturbances and the measurement noise. Moreover, it is only assumed that the measurement noise and the disturbances are bounded without any additional information such as stationarity, uncorrelation or type of distribution. The proposed observer is illustrated through numerical simulations.