Distributed Control Design for Spatially Interconnected Systems with Robustness to Small Communication Delays

Recent results by the authors have shown how to construct a class of structured controllers for large scale spatially interconnected systems via linear matrix inequalities. Of paramount importance in the control of interconnected systems is that the controlled system be stable when arbitrarily small communication delays are present between subsystems. In this paper, it is shown how to realize the structured controllers obtained from the linear matrix inequalities in order to ensure this property for the closed loop system.