Distributed Event-Based State Estimation for Networked Systems: An LMI-Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for designing distributed, event-triggered state estimators for networked systems, ensuring stability and performance while reducing communication, demonstrated on vehicle platoon control.

Contribution

It introduces an LMI-based synthesis procedure for distributed state estimators and event-triggering thresholds, enhancing scalability and communication efficiency.

Findings

Guaranteed stability and estimation performance.

Effective control of vehicle platoons with reduced communication.

Scalable approach demonstrated on multi-agent systems.

Abstract

In this work, a dynamic system is controlled by multiple sensor-actuator agents, each of them commanding and observing parts of the system's input and output. The different agents sporadically exchange data with each other via a common bus network according to local event-triggering protocols. From these data, each agent estimates the complete dynamic state of the system and uses its estimate for feedback control. We propose a synthesis procedure for designing the agents' state estimators and the event triggering thresholds. The resulting distributed and event-based control system is guaranteed to be stable and to satisfy a predefined estimation performance criterion. The approach is applied to the control of a vehicle platoon, where the method's trade-off between performance and communication, and the scalability in the number of agents is demonstrated.