LAUSR

Abstract Adaptive observers are recursive algorithms for joint estimation of both state variables and unknown parameters. Usually some persistent excitation (PE) condition is required for the convergence of adaptive observers. However, in practice, it may happen that the PE condition is not satisfied, because the available sensor signals do not contain sufficient information for the considered recursive estimation problem, which is ill-posed. To remedy the lack of PE condition, inspired by typical methods for solving ill-posed inverse problems, this paper proposes a regularized adaptive observer for general linear time varying (LTV) systems. Two regularization terms are introduced in both state and parameter estimation recursions, in order to preserve the state-parameter decoupling transformation involved in the design of the adaptive observer. Like in typical ill-posed inverse problems, regularization implies an estimation bias, which can be reduced by using prior knowledge about the unknown parameters.