Recent Developments in Event-Triggered Control of Nonlinear Systems: An Overview

Event-triggered control is a most popular paradigm for transferring feedback information in an economical “as needed” manner. The study of event-triggered control can be traced back to the 1960s. Following significant advances on the topic of control over networks and the topic of nonlinear control systems over the last two decades, event-triggered control has quickly emerged as a major theoretical subject in control theory. Applications of event-triggered control are wide-spread ranging from embedded control systems and industrial control processes to unmanned systems and cyber-physical transportation networks. In this paper, we first review developments in the synthesis of event-triggered sampling mechanisms. Various event triggering mechanisms, such as static event trigger, dynamic event trigger, time-regularized event trigger, and event trigger with positive threshold offsets, are systematically discussed. Then, we study how to design a stabilizing controller that is robust with respect to the sampling errors. Finally, we review some recent results in the directions of self-triggered control, event-triggered tracking control and cooperative control, and event-triggered control of stochastic systems and partial differential equation systems. Practical applications of event-triggered control are also discussed.