A Class of LTI Distributed Observers for LTI Plants: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Stabilizability

Consider that an autonomous linear time-invariant (LTI) plant is given and that a network of LTI observers assesses its output vector. The dissemination of information within the network is dictated by a pre-specified directed graph in which each vertex represents an observer. Each observer computes its own state estimate using only the portion of the output vector accessible to it and the state estimates of other observers that are transmitted to it by its neighbors, according to the graph. This paper proposes an update rule that is a natural generalization of consensus, and for which we determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of parameters for the update rule that lead to asymptotic omniscience of the state of the plant at all observers. The conditions reduce to certain detectability requirements that imply that if omniscience is not possible under the proposed scheme then it is not viable under any other scheme that is subject to the same communication graph, including nonlinear and time-varying ones.