Distributed consensus observers based H_∞ control for continuous systems with sensor and actuator networks

This paper proposes a distributed consensus observers (DCOs) based H_∞ control method for a class of linear time-invariant (LTI) continuous systems with sensor and actuator networks (SANs), whose topology is represented by a directed graph. It is assumed that each actuator node in the SAN can transmit its control input signal to all sensor nodes. According to the topology of the SAN, a set of DCOs of the sensor nodes and a set of DCOs-based controllers of the actuator nodes are given respectively to facilitate that the proposed method is able to estimate and control the system in a fully distributed way. Subsequently, a DCOs-based H_∞ control design method is proposed in terms of bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) to guarantee the exponential stability of the closed-loop system in the absence of external disturbances while satisfying a prescribed H_∞ performance of disturbance attenuation in the presence of external disturbances. Moreover, a two-stage design procedure is presented to solve the BMI feasibility problem. Finally, a numerical simulation study is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed design method.