Adaptive parameter estimation for a general dynamical system with unknown states

Summary This paper is concerned with the design of a state filter for a time‐delay state‐space system with unknown parameters from noisy observation information. The key is to investigate new identification algorithms for interactive state and parameter estimation of the considered system. Firstly, an observability canonical state‐space model is derived from the original model by linear transformation for the purpose of simplifying the model structure. Secondly, a direct state filter is formulated by minimizing the state estimation error covariance matrix on the basis of the Kalman filtering principle. Thirdly, once the unknown states are estimated, a state filter–based recursive least squares algorithm is proposed for parameter estimation using the least squares principle. Then, a state filter–based hierarchical least squares algorithm is derived by decomposing the original system into several subsystems for improving the computational efficiency. Finally, the numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms.