Event-based state estimation using an improved stochastic send-on-delta sampling scheme

Event-based sensing and communication holds the promise of lower resource utilization and/or better performance for remote state estimation applications found in e.g. networked control systems. Recently, stochastic event-triggering rules have been proposed as a means to avoid the complexity of the problem that normally arises in event-based estimator design. By using a scaled Gaussian function in the stochastic triggering scheme, the optimal remote state estimator becomes a linear Kalman filter with a case dependent measurement update. In this paper we propose a modified version of the stochastic send-on-delta triggering rule. The idea is to use a very simple predictor in the sensor, which allows the communication rate to be reduced while preserving estimation performance compared to regular stochastic send-on-delta sampling. We derive the optimal mean-square error estimator for the new scheme and present upper and lower bounds on the error covariance. The proposed scheme is evaluated in numerical examples, where it compares favorably to previous stochastic sampling approaches, and is shown to preserve estimation performance well even at large reductions in communication rate.