Event-triggered dynamic output feedback control for switched linear systems

Switched linear systems and their control have been an active research field in the past two decades; however, no systematic results have been reported in the literature on how such systems behave when event-triggered control is introduced. While the potential advantage of introducing event-triggered mechanism is obvious, namely to reduce unnecessary sensing, communication and computation as shown by fast growing literature, the challenge resulted from the mixture of event times for control and switching times for the systems' inherent dynamics cannot be easily handled by the existing tools. In this paper, for switched linear systems under dynamic, output feedback, event-triggered control, we propose a set of co-design methodologies that consider jointly the design of controller parameters, construction of switching logics and the condition for event triggering. The key step is to consider multiple Lyapunov functions incorporating possible triggered events and thus compute a priori tight lower bounds for the average dwell time for stabilizing the closed-loop systems. One additional benefit of using the proposed co-design method is to exclude straightforwardly the nasty Zeno behavior that may cause event to be triggered infinitely often within finite time. The fact that only the plant's measurable output signal is utilized by the control opens new ground for applying event-triggered control in real applications.