Design of observers implemented over FlexRay networks

We investigate the observer design for nonlinear systems whose measurements are sent over a network governed by FlexRay. FlexRay is a communication protocol used in the automotive industry which has the feature to switch between two scheduling rules associated with the two segments of its communication cycles. The objective of this paper is to generalize existing works on emulated observers for networked control systems (NCS) to be applicable to NCS with FlexRay. We propose for that purpose a novel hybrid model and guarantee the observer convergence provided that, for each segment, the scheduling rules are uniformly globally exponentially stable and the maximal allowable transmission intervals satisfy given explicit bounds. The analysis relies on the use of an hybrid Lyapunov function we recently constructed to investigate the stabilization of NCS with FlexRay. We finally apply the approach to a class of globally Lipschitz systems, which includes linear time-invariant systems as a particular case.