Distributed State Estimation under Heterogeneous Time-Varying Communication Delays

In this paper we study the distributed leader state estimation problem in leader-follower multi-agent systems over a deterministic network and under time-varying communication delays. In this work we propose a distributed estimation technique that allows the follower agents to collectively reconstruct the leader agent states by communicating their estimates with neighboring agents. Additionally, we assume that the communications between the leader and followers are subject to heterogeneous time-varying delays. By using the low gain methodology, sufficient stability conditions of the estimation error dynamics in the presence of network latency are derived, including an upper bound for the delay magnitude. Lastly, the proposed distributed state estimation method is applied to develop a solution to the leader tracking problem in leader-follower multi-agent systems. An illustrative example is also presented to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical results.