In this paper, we study the problem of jointly retrieving the state of a
dynamical system, as well as the state of the sensors deployed to estimate it.
We assume that the sensors possess a simple computational unit that is capable
of performing simple operations, such as retaining the current state and model
of the system in its memory.
We assume the system to be observable (given all the measurements of the
sensors), and we ask whether each sub-collection of sensors can retrieve the
state of the underlying physical system, as well as the state of the remaining
sensors. To this end, we consider communication between neighboring sensors,
whose adjacency is captured by a communication graph. We then propose a linear
update strategy that encodes the sensor measurements as states in an augmented
state space, with which we provide the solution to the problem of retrieving
the system and sensor states.
The present paper contains three main contributions. First, we provide
necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure observability of the system and
sensor states from any sensor. Second, we address the problem of adding
communication between sensors when the necessary and sufficient conditions are
not satisfied, and devise a strategy to this end. Third, we extend the former
case to include different costs of communication between sensors. Finally, the
concepts defined and the method proposed are used to assess the state of an
example of approximate structural brain dynamics through linearized
measurements.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, extended version of paper accepted at IEEE
Conference on Decision and Control 201
