The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in observers for nonlinear systems. This subject is relevant in different contexts such as synchronization of complex dynamical systems, fault detection and isolation, and output feedback control. This book contains the contributions that are to be presented at the workshop "New Directions in Nonlinear Observer Design", to be held from June 24-26, 1999, in Geiranger Fjord, Norway. The workshop has been organised by Olav Egeland, Thor I. Fossen and Henk Nijmeijer; it will include participants from Africa, Asia, Europe and USA and it will focus on recent developments in the above mentioned areas. The contributions form a good review of present achievements and challenges in nonlinear observer design. The workshop is supported by the Strategic University Program on Marine Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and ABB.

Comprehensive overview of present achievements and challenges in nonlinear observer design Focuses upon recent trends and speculates on future ones This book can be used by engineers to supplement their knowledge of linear design techniques

Inhalt
A viewpoint on observability and observer design for nonlinear systems.- Model-based observers for tire/road contact friction prediction.- Observer design for nonlinear oscillatory systems.- Transformation to state affine system and observer design.- On existence of extended observers for nonlinear discrete-time systems.- Stability analysis and observer design for nonlinear diffusion processes.- Nonlinear passive observer design for ships with adaptive wave filtering.- Nonlinear observer design for integration of DGPS and INS.- Variants of nonlinear normal form observer design.- Separation results for semiglobal stabilization of nonlinear systems via measurement feedback.- Observer-controller design for global tracking of nonholonomic systems.- A separation principle for a class of euler-lagrange systems.- High-gain observers in nonlinear feedback control.- Output-Feedback Control of stochastic nonlinear systems.- Output feedback control of food-chain systems.- Output feedback tracking control for ships.- Dynamic UCO controllers and semiglobal stabilization of uncertain nonminimum phase systems by output feedback.- Fault detection observer for a class of nonlinear systems.- Nonlinear observer for signal and parameter fault detection in ship propulsion control.- Nonlinear observers for fault detection and isolation.- Application of nonlinear observers to fault detection and isolation.- Innovation generation for bilinear systems with unknown inputs.- Synchronization through extended kalman filtering.- Nonlinear discrete-time observers for synchronization problems.- Chaos synchronization.