A fractional PI observer for incommensurate fractional order systems under parametric uncertainties

The problem of state observation in incommensurate fractional order systems has been poorly studied. Currently some observers that have been proposed are based on a copy of the system, which causes them to be highly dependent on the system parameters, additionally they are redundant (estimate variables that are available). So this paper proposes a novel fractional observer against parametric uncertainties for a certain type of incommensurate fractional order systems. The fractional observer design is based on a property concerning observability in incommensurate fractional order systems which allows us to construct the observer only considering the available output and its fractional derivatives. On the other hand, the convergence analysis of the observation error is carried out using a particular approach of fractional order systems related to the Global Mittag-Leffler boundedness. We prove that there is a compact set GMLA (Globally Mittag-Leffler Attractive, according to Definition 4) where the system that represents the observation error dynamics is attractive and we also prove that the observation error is uniformly bounded. Additionally, the fractional observer is model-free i.e., a system copy is not required, this gives robustness in spite of parametric uncertainties and it is also reduced order therefore one observer must be designed for each variable that we want to estimate consequently the observer is non-redundant (no estimation of variables that are already available). Moreover, our proposed fractional observer can be designed for commensurate fractional order systems and we also show that if we consider integer derivative order, the proposed fractional observer presents certain properties. Finally, in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed fractional observer, an incommensurate fractional order Rössler hyperchaotic system is considered as a numerical example and an incommensurate fractional model of the COVID-19 pandemic as a real-world application.