The objective of this dissertation is to develop observers and observer-based controllers synthesis methods for time-delay systems. Different classes of systems were treated with different types of delay. Three different methods were developed. The first one treats nonlinear systems with Lipschitz nonlinearities and consists in transforming the original system into an LPV system based on a reformulation of the classical Lipschitz property. This technique was formulated for continuous and discrete cases respectively and it was proven to provide less restrictive synthesis conditions when compared to the existing results in the literature. The second method deals with singular systems with disturbances. The main difficulty lay in the presence of the derivatives of the disturbances which hinder the stability analysis and for which two approaches are proposed: a Hinf criterion combined with a special Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional depending on disturbances and a W1;2 criterion based on the use of Sobolev norms. The last method is based on the Free Weighting Matrices technique to solve the observation and control problems of a class of nonlinear systems with unknown delays. The proposed solution provides a sufficient LMI synthesis condition ensuring the asymptotic stabilization of the closed loop system, instead of the iterative LMI condition usually found in the literature.
Observation and control of nonlinear time-delay systems