On sliding mode observers for non-infinitely observable descriptor systems

International audience; This paper presents a sliding mode observer (SMO) design method to estimate the states and unknown inputs (UIs) in a class of non-infinitely observable (NIO) descriptor systems that contain UIs in both the state and output equations. Existing works on SMO design for NIO systems did not consider UIs in the output equation. In order to overcome the difficulty caused by UIs in output channels and the NIO condition, we reformulated the original system and introduced new UIs to replace the original UIs to obtain an equivalent infinitely observable descriptor system whose output does not contain any UI. Based on the developed equivalent system, a new SMO method is proposed to estimate both the states and the UIs. Subsequently, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the SMO are derived in terms of the original system matrices, which thus makes the conditions easy to be examined. Finally, an example is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.