Set-Valued State Estimation for Uncertain Dynamic Systems with Imprecisely Known Measurement Time Instants

Set-membership state estimation approaches have been developed in recent years to implement observers that allow for bounding the domains of possible system states in a guaranteed manner. For that purpose, it is necessary to describe the system dynamics either by continuous-time or discrete-time state equations in which uncertainty of parameters and initial conditions as well as the influence of noise are represented by bounded domains. The same holds for the system’s output equation, where measurement noise is again assumed to be bounded with measurement time instants that are typically assumed to be perfectly known. This latter assumption is removed in this paper to make the bounded-error state estimation approach applicable to a wide range of systems where measurement time instants are only imprecisely known. This is typically the case for distributed control systems in which sensor and actuator signals are transmitted via a communication network. As such, the wide classes of robotic multi-agent systems as well as distributed energy systems belong to this kind of models.