A hybrid observer for localization of mobile vehicles with asynchronous measurements

The aim of this paper is the design of a hybrid nonlinear observer for mobile vehicles. The main problem is that position and velocity measurements are provided with a very low frequency, and the time between two consecutive measurements could be not constant, but it could vary randomly within a certain interval of time. For this reason the proposed observer has been contextualized in the hybrid systems framework. The convergence analysis of the estimation error has been carried out, and the sensitivity analysis has been performed in order to evaluate the bound of the estimation error when the measurements are biased and/or noisy. Simulation and experimental results, carried out on a mobile vehicle, show the feasibility of the proposed observer and the good behaviors in terms of estimation error that can be achieved.