Design of Distributed Nonlinear Observers Without Using Global Inputs

This paper investigates the design of distributed observers for a class of nonlinear systems. The designed distributed observers reside in a network of sensor nodes. The communication links in the network enable each sensor node to estimate all states of the nonlinear system, even though each one can only collect a small portion of the system's outputs. However, all inputs of the system are still needed at each node to carry out a correct state estimation. For this problem, the paper further proposes a distributed nonlinear observer without using global inputs, in which each sensor node only needs partial input information of the nonlinear system.