Periodic event-triggered control of nonlinear systems using overapproximation techniques

In event-triggered control, the control task consisting of sampling the plant's output and updating the control input is executed whenever a certain event function exceeds a given threshold. The event function typically needs to be monitored continuously, which is difficult to realize in digital implementations. This has led to the development of periodic event-triggered control (PETC), in which the event function is only evaluated periodically. In this paper, we consider general nonlinear continuous event-triggered control (CETC) systems, and present a method to transform the CETC system into a PETC system. In particular, we provide an explicit sampling period at which the event function is evaluated and we present a constructive procedure to redesign the triggering condition. The latter is obtained by upper-bounding the evolution of the event function of the CETC system between two successive sampling instants by a linear time-invariant system and then by using convex overapproximation techniques. Using this approach, we are able to preserve the control performance guarantees (e.g., asymptotic stability with a certain decay rate) of the original CETC system.