Event-triggered output-based adaptive distributed observer over jointly connected networks and its application

The adaptive distributed observer for a leader system is a fully distributed dynamic compensator for estimating the state variables and the system matrix of a linear leader system over a communication network. In this paper, we first propose an event-triggered implementation of the output-based adaptive distributed observer for a linear leader system over jointly connected communication networks. Then we show that the proposed triggering mechanism not only retains the exponential convergence property of the analog adaptive distributed observer but also prevents the Zeno phenomenon from happening. Our result includes several existing results as special cases and is applicable when the state of the leader system is unavailable. Finally, we apply the proposed event-triggered output-based adaptive distributed observer to solve the cooperative linear output regulation problem. A numerical example is used to validate our design.