Almost Fixed Time Observers for Parameters and for State Variables of Nonlinear Systems

We provide new finite-time and fast-converging observers for continuous-time nonlinear systems that contain unknown constant parameters and measurement delays. When the dynamics are affine in the unmeasured state, we obtain fixed time observers that identify unknown states and unknown model parameters. When the dynamics contain a nonlinearity that depends on the unmeasured state, we instead obtain asymptotic convergence of our observers, whose rate of convergence converges to infinity as the growth rate of this nonlinearity converges to zero, so in this case we call the observers almost fixed time observers. Our examples illustrate how our assumptions can be easily checked.