This paper investigates the state interval estimation and fault detection (FD) problems for a Lipschitz nonlinear switched system based on the combination of the
H∞$$ {H}_{\infty } $$ observer and the zonotope method. To begin with, an
H∞$$ {H}_{\infty } $$ observer that is robust to the disturbance is designed, and the stability of the observer error dynamic system is analyzed under the average dwell time (ADT) concept. After this, the zonotope theory is applied on the
H∞$$ {H}_{\infty } $$ observer error dynamic system such that the interval state estimation can be calculated iteratively when the system suffers from no fault. Furthermore, for FD purpose, a residual is constructed based on the
H∞$$ {H}_{\infty } $$ observer. Because the constructed residual contains disturbance, it cannot be used for FD directly. To overcome this drawback, the interval estimation method of the residual is proposed by using the zonotope method, and a residual‐based FD scheme is developed. Finally, a simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.