State Estimation Using a Network of Observers for a Class of Nonlinear Systems with Communication Delay

Distributed observer design is critical for large-scale systems to collectively estimate the system state via networked sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed observer scheme for estimating the states of a class of nonlinear systems. Unknown and time-varying communication delays are considered due to ubiquitous network latency when information is exchanged among observer nodes. Based on the Lyapunov stability criterion, a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) are derived for the design of observer gains, which ensure asymptotic convergence of the state estimates to the true state trajectories in the presence of communication delays. Simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its advantage over a recent approach without considering communication delays.