Output synchronization of heterogeneous LTI plants with event-triggered communication

This paper proposes a control architecture to achieve output synchronization of a group of heterogeneous LTI plants. To each plant, we associate a local controller that comprises a dynamic output feedback controller and a reference generator. The local dynamic output feedback controller is designed such that the output of the plant tracks the output of the reference generator. The reference generator includes an internal state that should be synchronized across all reference generators. The decision to broadcast this synchronization state to its neighbors is done by employing an event-triggered communication protocol. It is shown that, with the proposed control architecture, the solutions of the closed-loop system are globally bounded and that there exist positive lower bounds for the inter-event intervals generated the by event-triggered mechanism associated with the broadcast of synchronization states. A self-triggered implementation of the proposed event-triggered communication protocol is also presented.