  A new approach to design of nonlinear observers (state estimators) is
proposed. The main idea is to (i) construct a convex set of dynamical systems
which are contracting observers for a particular system, and (ii) optimize over
this set for one which minimizes a bound on state-estimation error on a
simulated noisy data set. We construct convex sets of continuous-time and
discrete-time observers, as well as contracting sampled-data observers for
continuous-time systems. Convex bounds for learning are constructed using
Lagrangian relaxation. The utility of the proposed methods are verified using
numerical simulation.
