State estimation in MIMO nonlinear systems subject to unknown deadzones using recurrent neural networks

This paper deals with the problem of state observation by means of a continuous-time recurrent neural network for a broad class of MIMO unknown nonlinear systems subject to unknown but bounded disturbances and with an unknown deadzone at each input. With respect to previous works, the main contribution of this study is twofold. On the one hand, the need of a matrix Riccati equation is conveniently avoided; in this way, the design process is considerably simplified. On the other hand, a faster convergence is carried out. Specifically, the exponential convergence of Euclidean norm of the observation error to a bounded zone is guaranteed. Likewise, the weights are shown to be bounded. The main tool to prove these results is Lyapunov-like analysis. A numerical example confirms the feasibility of our proposal.