A Distributed Observer Accommodating a Broad Range of Intermittent Communication Scenarios

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed observer that utilizes intermittent communication and accommodates a broad range of scenarios, including asynchronous operation, unidirectional communication, packet loss, and communication delays. An analysis over jointly connected switching topology supports this and provides a condition for exponential convergence of the estimation error. This condition can be used to determine a communication rate. The analysis is valid when the unobservable subspace of each agent admits an invariant orthogonal complement. This is a property that is always achievable via a coordinate transformation when the system matrix is diagonalizable over the complex field.