Output-Based Event-Triggered Control With Guaranteed L∞-Gain and Improved and Decentralized Event-Triggering

Most event-triggered controllers available nowadays are based on static state-feedback controllers. As in many control applications full state measurements are not available for feedback, it is the objective of this paper to propose event-triggered dynamical output-based controllers. The fact that the controller is based on output feedback instead of state feedback does not allow for straightforward extensions of existing event-triggering mechanisms if a minimum time between two subsequent events has to be guaranteed. Furthermore, since sensor and actuator nodes can be physically distributed, centralized event-triggering mechanisms are often prohibitive and, therefore, we will propose a decentralized event-triggering mechanism. This event-triggering mechanism invokes transmission of the outputs in a node when the difference between the current values of the outputs in the node and their previously transmitted values becomes large compared to the current values and an additional threshold. For such event-triggering mechanisms, we will study closed-loop stability and L-infinity-performance and provide bounds on the minimum time between two subsequent events generated by each node, the so-called inter-event time of a node. This enables us to make tradeoffs between closed-loop performance on the one hand and communication load on the other hand, or even between the communication load of individual nodes. In addition, we will model the event-triggered control system using an impulsive model, which truly describes the behavior of the event-triggered control system. As a result, we will be able to guarantee stability and performance for event-triggered controllers with larger minimum inter-event times than the existing results in the literature. We illustrate the developed theory using three numerical examples.