This paper undertakes a systematic review (SR) on distributed estimation techniques applied to cyber-physical systems (CPS). Even though SRs are not the common way to survey a theme in the control community, they provide a rigorous, robust and objective formula that should not be always ignored. The presented SR incorporates and adapts the guidelines recommended in other fields (mainly biosciences and computer sciences) to the field of automation and control and presents a brief description of the different phases that constitute an SR. As a result, this review compares the different techniques found in the literature in terms of: The proposed estimator (Kalman filter, Luenberger observer, Bayesian filter, etc.), the particular application within CPS, the design of the estimators (decentralized vs centralized), the amount of data required for implementation or the inclusion of experiments/simulations in the studies. Particular attention is paid to those papers that present some results in applications that include humans, animals or biological systems.

The paper proposes an innovative estimation and control scheme that enables the distributed monitoring and control of large-scale processes. The proposed approach considers a discrete linear time-invariant process controlled by a network of agents that may both collect information about the evolution of the plant and apply control actions to drive its behaviour. The problem makes full sense when local observability/controllability is not assumed and the communication between agents can be exploited to reach system-wide goals. Additionally, to reduce agents bandwidth requirements and power consumption, an event-based communication policy is studied. The design procedure guarantees system stability, allowing the designer to trade-off performance, control effort and communication requirements. The obtained controllers and observers are implemented in a fully distributed fashion. To illustrate the performance of the proposed technique, experimental results on a quadruple-tank process are provided.

This paper is concerned with event-based H₂/H_∞ control design for networked systems with interval time-varying delays. The contributions are twofold. First, conditions for uniform ultimately bounded stability are provided in the H₂/H_∞ event-based context. The relation between the boundedness of the stability region and the threshold that triggers the events is studied. Second, a practical design procedure for event-based H₂/H_∞ control is provided. The method makes use of Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals (LKFs) and it is characterised by its generality, as only mild assumptions are imposed on the structures of the LKF and the cost functional. The robustness and performance of the proposed technique is showed through numerical simulations.

This brief presents a robust nonlinear state estimator for autonomous surface vehicles, where the movement is restricted to the horizontal plane. It is assumed that only the vehicle position and orientation can be measured, being the former affected by bounded noises. Then, under some fair standard assumptions concerning the maximum velocities and acceleration rates of the vehicle, the estimator is able to reconstruct not only the velocities but also the lumped generalized disturbances that cluster external disturbances, nonlinearities, and unmodeled dynamics. The observer is easily tunable by the user, with a set of four scalars, two of them related to the velocity of convergence of the estimator, and other two parameters to set the desired tradeoff between noise sensitivity and disturbance rejection. Several simulations with a well-known test-bed craft are provided to show how the proposed algorithm outperforms previous ones in the literature under realistic environmental conditions.