Proper Implicit Discretization of Arbitrary-Order Robust Exact Differentiators

This paper considers the implicit Euler discretization of Levant’s arbitrary order robust exact differentiator in presence of sampled measurements. Existing implicit discretizations of that differentiator are shown to exhibit either unbounded bias errors or, surprisingly, discretization chattering despite the use of the implicit discretization. A new, proper implicit discretization that exhibits neither of these two detrimental effects is proposed by computing the differentiator’s outputs as appropriately designed linear combinations of its state variables. A numerical differentiator implementation is discussed and closed-form stability conditions for arbitrary differentiation orders are given. The influence of bounded measurement noise and numerical approximation errors is formally analyzed. Numerical simulations confirm the obtained results.