An Emulation Approach to Output-Feedback Sampled-Data Synchronization

This paper studies state synchronization of homogeneous LTI agents to a trajectory generated by a given exosystem under both spatial and temporal communication constraints. In particular, communication between the agents is assumed to be intermittent and asynchronous, i.e. effectively acting on a time-varying graph at irregular sampling instances. The paper extends our previous state-feedback result to the output feedback setting. This naturally requires the introduction of local state observers, which complement local continuous-time emulators of unconstrained closed-loop dynamics. The observer interaction with emulators is not unique and we propose an architecture that greatly streamlines the analysis of the closed-loop system and simplifies the implementation of the scheme. As a result, the synchronization is proved under mild persistency of connectivity assumption on spacial connectivity under arbitrary uniformly bounded sampling intervals.