Design of distributed observers with arbitrarily large communication delays

The design of networked observers has recently received much consideration. This paper is concerned with the design of distributed observers with arbitrarily large communication time delays. A traditional centralized observer assumes access to the full output the plant. In the real world situations, the output is often measured by distributed senors connected through a communication network. We propose the design of a set of distributed observers with time delays in the communication channels. Each observer is regarded as an agent, which obtains local information of the plant and communicates with other observers through an undirected communication network, with arbitrarily large time delays. Conditions are established under which the states of all observers converge exponentially to the plant state. Numerical results are proposed to illustrate our results.