Cooperative Control and Estimation in Networked Systems with Distributed Event-Triggered Communication Protocols

A networked system (NS) is a system consisting of spatially distributed intelligent agents to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and to cooperatively transmit their data through the network. Each agent is small, inexpensive and can be easily deployed over a vast region. The application of NSs has been widely seen in many real-world engineering systems including wireless sensor networks, and distributed robotic systems.Efficient communication among agents is the key for NSs to strive the whole system towards a common goal in a collaborative fashion. However, in most cases, agents are equipped with limited batteries (or energy resources) supply. In particular, when NSs are used for critical tasks such as military or power system applications, it is unfeasible to recharge or replace the battery due to the hostile environment. Therefore, avoiding unnecessary energy consumption becomes more of a concern. It is highly desirable to exploit effective protocols to save the communication cost as much as possible.Recently, event-triggered control has been proposed as an alternative approach to the more traditional periodic execution of control tasks. On the premise of guaranteeing desired levels of performance, event-based schedule aims at decreasing the system's unnecessary execution behaviour and therefore saves cost as well as resources. Hence, this makes event-triggered control particularly useful in the collaborative framework.Although event-triggered control has already stirred quite a lot research attention, the distributed behaviour of the networked systems does bring some essential difficulties in controlling performance and reliability issues. The open problems include the development of a set of distributed event-triggered control techniques, establishment of a quantified relation between energy consumption and system performance, as well as the design of a cooperative framework for estimation or control in networked systems with distributed event-triggered communication protocol.This proposal has set up three new, challenging yet achievable objects to the theoretical investigation, algorithm development and practical applications of networked systems using event-triggered control strategies. The proposed research would have both theoretical and practical significance in advancing analysis technologies of networked complex systems.