Strong∗ detectability and observers for linear time-varying systems

This work presents a notion of strong detectability for linear time-varying systems affected by unknown inputs. It is shown that this notion is equivalent to detectability of an auxiliary system without unknown inputs. This allows a straightforward observer design for dependable state estimation in the presence of unknown inputs. The design reduces to a deterministic Kalman filter design problem, where the observer gains can be obtained from the solution of a differential Riccati equation. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated by means of two examples.