  The aim of this paper is to present the application of an approach to study
contraction theory recently developed for piecewise smooth and switched
systems. The approach that can be used to analyze incremental stability
properties of so-called Filippov systems (or variable structure systems) is
based on the use of regularization, a procedure to make the vector field of
interest differentiable before analyzing its properties. We show that by using
this extension of contraction theory to nondifferentiable vector fields, it is
possible to design observers for a large class of piecewise smooth systems
using not only Euclidean norms, as also done in previous literature, but also
non-Euclidean norms. This allows greater flexibility in the design and
encompasses the case of both piecewise-linear and piecewise-smooth (nonlinear)
systems. The theoretical methodology is illustrated via a set of representative
examples.
