AbstractThe problem of designing state and adaptive disturbance observers for a class of nonlinear descriptor systems with the disturbance generated by an unknown exogenous system is addressed in this paper. Especially, the nonlinear terms satisfy incremental quadratic constraints parameterized by a bunch of multiplier matrices, which can represent various classes of nonlinearities. For three different cases in the output equation, the state and adaptive disturbance observers are proposed. Some sufficient conditions formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities and algebraic constraints are derived to guarantee that state and disturbance error systems, simultaneously, are asymptotically stable with performance level. The availability of proposed observers is validated by two practical examples.