Synchronised output regulation of heterogeneous networks with delayed and sampled-data communications

This article studies a synchronised output regulation (SOR) problem exchanging information at sampled time. Each node has a continuous-time internal model controller and a local exosystem providing a reference output signal. At sampled time, each node sends the exosystem state to its neighbouring nodes, as well as updates the exosystem dynamics by the received sampled data. A necessary and sufficient condition that the sampled period should satisfy for SOR with fixed digraph and time delay is presented. A numerical simulation shows an efficacy of analytic results.