H∞ Switched-Gain Based Observer vs Nonlinear Transformation Based Observer for a Vehicle Tracking Model

The main objective of this paper is to provide a comparison between two nonlinear observer design methods for a vehicle tracking problem based on a kinematic model. This challenging tracking issue is difficult to solve because of the nature of the nonlinearities in the dynamics process, which are all non-monotonic. First, we will extend the switched-gain based approach, established recently in the literature, to systems with disturbances in both the state dynamics and in the output measurements, and investigate its H∞ performance. Then we will introduce a new way to avoid non-monotonic nonlinearities by using a specific nonlinear transformation to bring the system into a suitable form for which available techniques in the literature can be applied. Finally, numerical comparisons between the two design methods are provided, where the H∞ based switched gain observer has better performance with respect to measurement noise.