Design of distributed event-triggered states and unknown disturbances observers for time-varying delay interconnected systems

This article considers the problem of designing distributed event-triggered states and unknown disturbances observers for a class of nonlinear interconnected systems where the local state vectors are affected by unknown delays and the nonlinear function satisfying the Lipschitz condition. Distributed observers are designed based on the local input vector and both the local and remote output vectors. Different from previously distributed observers for interconnected systems where the local and remote output vectors are updated continuously, the one in this article uses only information on the local and remote output vectors updating at triggering instants of proposed event-triggered mechanisms. This indicates that the proposed method in this article is better than the existing ones in saving communication resources while still keeping an acceptable estimation performance. Sufficient conditions for the existence of the proposed distributed observers are established and are formed in a convex optimization problem which can be easily solved by using the MATLAB LMI Control Toolbox. Finally, a numerical example is given to confirm the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.