Moving horizon estimation for networked systems with quantized measurements and packet dropouts

published_or_final_versio

Stability, observer design and control of networks using Lyapunov methods

We investigate different aspects of the analysis and control of interconnected systems. Different tools, based on Lyapunov methods, are provided to analyze such systems in view of stability, to design observers and to control systems subject to stabilization. All the different tools presented in this work can be used for many applications and extend the analysis toolbox of networks. Considering systems with inputs, the stability property input-to-state dynamical stability (ISDS) has some advantages over input-to-state stability (ISS). We introduce the ISDS property for interconnected systems and provide an ISDS small-gain theorem with a construction of an ISDS-Lyapunov function and the rate and the gains of the ISDS estimation for the whole system. This result is applied to observer design for single and interconnected systems. Observers are used in many applications where the measurement of the state is not possible or disturbed due to physical reasons or the measurement is uneconomical. By the help of error Lyapunov functions we design observers, which have a so-called quasi ISS or quasi-ISDS property to guarantee that the dynamics of the estimation error of the systems state has the ISS or ISDS property, respectively. This is applied to quantized feedback stabilization. In many applications, there occur time-delays and/or instantaneous jumps of the systems state. At first, we provide tools to check whether a network of time-delay systems has the ISS property using ISS-Lyapunov-Razumikhin functions and ISS-Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals. Then, these approaches are also used for interconnected impulsive systems with time-delays using exponential Lyapunov-Razumikhin functions and exponential Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals. We derive conditions to assure ISS of an impulsive network with time-delays. Controlling a system in a desired and optimal way under given constraints is a challenging task. One approach to handle such problems is model predictive control (MPC). In this thesis, we introduce the ISDS property for MPC of single and interconnected systems. We provide conditions to assure the ISDS property of systems using MPC, where the previous result of this thesis, the ISDS small-gain theorem, is applied. Furthermore, we investigate the ISS property for MPC of time-delay systems using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii approach. We prove theorems, which guarantee ISS for single and interconnected systems using MPC

Estimation and control with limited information and unreliable feedback

Advancement in sensing technology is introducing new sensors that can provide information that was not available before. This creates many opportunities for the development of new control systems. However, the measurements provided by these sensors may not follow the classical assumptions from the control literature. As a result, standard control tools fail to maximize the performance in control systems utilizing these new sensors. In this work we formulate new assumptions on the measurements applicable to new sensing capabilities, and develop and analyze control tools that perform better than the standard tools under these assumptions. Specifically, we make the assumption that the measurements are quantized. This assumption is applicable, for example, to low resolution sensors, remote sensing using limited bandwidth communication links, and vision-based control. We also make the assumption that some of the measurements may be faulty. This assumption is applicable to advanced sensors such as GPS and video surveillance, as well as to remote sensing using unreliable communication links. The first tool that we develop is a dynamic quantization scheme that makes a control system stable to any bounded disturbance using the minimum number of quantization regions. Both full state feedback and output feedback are considered, as well as nonlinear systems. We further show that our approach remains stable under modeling errors and delays. The main analysis tool we use for proving these results is the nonlinear input-to-state stability property. The second tool that we analyze is the Minimum Sum of Distances estimator that is robust to faulty measurements. We prove that this robustness is maintained when the measurements are also corrupted by noise, and that the estimate is stable with respect to such noise. We also develop an algorithm to compute the maximum number of faulty measurements that this estimator is robust to. The last tool we consider is motivated by vision-based control systems. We use a nonlinear optimization that is taking place over both the model parameters and the state of the plant in order to estimate these quantities. Using the example of an automatic landing controller, we demonstrate the improvement in performance attainable with such a tool

Distributed Estimation and Performance Limits in Resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Distributed inference arising in sensor networks has been an interesting and promising discipline in recent years. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate several issues related to distributed inference in sensor networks, emphasizing parameter estimation and target tracking with resource-constrainted networks. To reduce the transmissions between sensors and the fusion center thereby saving bandwidth and energy consumption in sensor networks, a novel methodology, where each local sensor performs a censoring procedure based on the normalized innovation square (NIS), is proposed for the sequential Bayesian estimation problem in this dissertation. In this methodology, each sensor sends only the informative measurements and the fusion center fuses both missing measurements and received ones to yield more accurate inference. The new methodology is derived for both linear and nonlinear dynamic systems, and both scalar and vector measurements. The relationship between the censoring rule based on NIS and the one based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is investigated. A probabilistic transmission model over multiple access channels (MACs) is investigated. With this model, a relationship between the sensor management and compressive sensing problems is established, based on which, the sensor management problem becomes a constrained optimization problem, where the goal is to determine the optimal values of probabilities that each sensor should transmit with such that the determinant of the Fisher information matrix (FIM) at any given time step is maximized. The performance of the proposed compressive sensing based sensor management methodology in terms of accuracy of inference is investigated. For the Bayesian parameter estimation problem, a framework is proposed where quantized observations from local sensors are not directly fused at the fusion center, instead, an additive noise is injected independently to each quantized observation. The injected noise performs as a low-pass filter in the characteristic function (CF) domain, and therefore, is capable of recoverving the original analog data if certain conditions are satisfied. The optimal estimator based on the new framework is derived, so is the performance bound in terms of Fisher information. Moreover, a sub-optimal estimator, namely, linear minimum mean square error estimator (LMMSE) is derived, due to the fact that the proposed framework theoretically justifies the additive noise modeling of the quantization process. The bit allocation problem based on the framework is also investigated. A source localization problem in a large-scale sensor network is explored. The maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator based on the quantized data from local sensors and its performance bound in terms of Cram\\u27{e}r-Rao lower bound (CRLB) are derived. Since the number of sensors is large, the law of large numbers (LLN) is utilized to obtain a closed-form version of the performance bound, which clearly shows the dependence of the bound on the sensor density, $i.e.,$ the Fisher information is a linearly increasing function of the sensor density. Error incurred by the LLN approximation is also theoretically analyzed. Furthermore, the design of sub-optimal local sensor quantizers based on the closed-form solution is proposed. The problem of on-line performance evaluation for state estimation of a moving target is studied. In particular, a compact and efficient recursive conditional Posterior Cram\\u27{e}r-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) is proposed. This bound provides theoretical justification for a heuristic one proposed by other researchers in this area. Theoretical complexity analysis is provided to show the efficiency of the proposed bound, compared to the existing bound