Distributed Observers with Dynamic Event-Triggered Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic event-triggered distributed observer for LTI systems that guarantees positive inter-event times and exponential convergence, reducing communication while maintaining estimation accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel dynamic event-triggered distributed observer that ensures positive MIETs and exponential convergence, including both node-based and edge-based mechanisms.

Findings

Guarantees strictly positive MIETs for the proposed observer.

Ensures exponential convergence of the estimation error.

Includes numerical examples demonstrating effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of distributed state estimation of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems under event-triggered communication. For event-triggering mechanisms, the existence of positive minimum inter-event times (MIETs) is an essential property for ensuring practicality. It is widely recognized that dynamic event-triggering mechanisms can effectively reduce redundant communication. However, for distributed observers, it remains unclear whether dynamic event-triggering mechanisms can ensure positive MIETs. This paper proposes a dynamic event-triggered distributed observer. By introducing new comparison functions, it is proven that the dynamic event-triggered distributed observer can guarantee strictly positive MIETs and ensure the exponential convergence of the estimation error. Moreover, most existing works on event-triggered distributed observers only consider node-based event-triggering mechanisms, while both node-based and edge-based dynamic event-triggering mechanisms are constructed in this paper. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results.