Event-based state estimation with negative information

To reduce the amount of data transfer in networked systems, measurements are usually taken only when an event occurs rather than periodically in time. However, this complicates estimation problems considerably as it is not guaranteed that new sensor measurements will be sampled. In order to cope with such event sampled measurements, an existing state estimator is modified so that any divergent behavior in estimation results will be curtailed. To start, a general formulation of event sampling is proposed, which is then used to set up a state estimator combining stochastic as well as set-membership measurement information according to a hybrid update: when an event occurs the estimated state is updated using the stochastic measurement received (positive information), while at periodic time instants no new measurement is received (negative information) and the update is based on knowledge that the sensor value lies within a bounded subset of the measurement space. An illustrative example further shows that the developed estimator has an improved representation of estimation errors compared to purely stochastic estimators for various event sampling strategies.