Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp.

113, July 2015

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/asjc.928

EVENT-TRIGGERED CONTROL OF LINEAR SYSTEMS WITH

SATURATED INPUTS
Wei Ni, Ping Zhao, Xiaoli Wang, and Jinhuan Wang
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the event-triggered control of linear systems with saturated state feedback and saturated
observer-based feedback, respectively. The problem of simultaneously deriving stabilizing event-triggered controllers
and tackling saturation nonlinearity is cast into a standard linear matrix inequalities problem. Key topics are studied,
such as event-triggered observer design and event-triggered saturated observer-based feedback synthesis. Important
issues are touched on, including the existence of the positive lower bound for inter-event times, and self-triggered
algorithms.
Key Words: Event-triggered control, event-triggered observer, linear systems, saturated inputs.

I. INTRODUCTION
Modern control systems are often implemented
in digital platforms by using the microprocessors. Traditional digital control techniques often assume that
controllers execute periodically. This is usually called
time-triggered control [2,10,20], where the stability of
the resulting sampled-data system under time triggered
control can be achieved if the worst situation, that the
sampling period is included in a certain interval, is considered. This paradigm may result in unnecessarily high
workloads since control does not utilize the resources in
an optimum way, and furthermore the control task is executed after the elapse of a certain amount of time regardless of whether anything significant has occurred in the
system. Realizing this, one hopes that the control is executed only when necessary rather than periodically; more
specifically, one may adapt the control sampling sequence
to some events on demand; this is usually achieved by
sampling and computing the controller only when a certain threshold condition on the state is violated. This is
so-called event-trigged control which has appeared as a
hot field of control theory in recent years; the readers
Manuscript received March 29, 2013; revised September 13, 2013; accepted
November 17, 2013.
W. Ni is with School of Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
P. Zhao (corresponding author, e-mail: zhaoping@amss.ac.cn) is with School
of Electrical Engineering, University of Jinan, Jinan, China.
X. Wang is with School of Information Science and Engineering, Harbin
Institute of Technology at Weihai, China.
J. Wang is with School of Sciences, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin,
China.
This work is supported by the NNSF of China (61304161, 61104096, 61374074,
61203142, 11361043), the JXNSF (20132BAB211037, 20114BAB201002), the
Youth Foundation of Jiangxi Provincial Education Department of China
(GJJ12132), and the Project-sponsored by SRF for ROCS, SEM.

are referred to [1,6,12,18,21] for more details. As an

alternative to the more traditional periodic execution of
control tasks, the event-triggered scheme has the merits
of reducing the number of executions while guaranteeing desired levels of performance, which makes them very
appealing in the context of sensor/actuator networks.
Although the event-triggered scheme is less simple and
predictable than the time-triggered one, it is the engineers first choice for implementation when considering
the usage of the systems resources; refer to [9,15] for
detailed justifications.
Another very important issue which is inherent
to control systems is the presence of control saturations. From an engineering point of view, most physical
actuators, sensors and interfacing devices are subject to
saturation because of the existence of hard limitation.
Considering these, one usually applies a saturation function to the control, resulting a control system with saturated inputs. As for saturated constraints on systems
input, suitable tools should be pursued to handle the saturation nonlinearity. There are many approaches to deal
with this, such as the polytopic representation approach,
sector nonlinearity model approach, saturation avoidance approach, parameterized algebraic Riccati equation
approach, and the anti-windup approach; interested
readers are referred to the books [7,19]. For the stabilization of linear systems with saturated inputs by
using event-triggered control, there are very few results
reported in the literature; see for example [8,11]. The
work of [8] investigates the stabilization of linear systems
via saturated and event-trigged state feedback, where
controllers are synthesized and stability properties are
derived using linear matrix inequalities. Event-triggered
PI control for scalar linear systems subject to input

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

Fig. 1. Event-triggered sensor-observer and observer-controller communications for saturated control systems.

saturation was considered in [11]. This paper is further

devoted to the event-triggered control of linear systems
with saturated inputs, but toward a more general framework, where the control is implemented from the viewpoint of networked control systems, shown in Fig. 1.
Note that the networked control system considered here is composed of a set of sensors, observers,
and control processing units, with them being embedded in a sensorobservercontroller network through
which the output measurements by sensors are sent to the
observers only at discrete instants when a certain condition, call a triggering condition, is violated; the states estimated by observers are synthesized into control signals
and transmitted, also at discrete instants when another
event-triggered condition is violated, through a saturation unit to the control controller. In this event-triggered
way of sensorobservercontroller transition of signal,
the number of times that a feedback law and an observer
strategy are executed is reduced, leading to a reduction
in transmissions and thus a reduction in energy expenditures. Obviously, event-triggered saturated state feedback
is a special case of this scenario, and our paper extends
the work of [8,11].
For linear systems with saturated inputs, the synthesis in our paper is carried out in a two-step way: an
event-triggered observer is designed to estimate the state,
and then another event-triggered observer-based feedback subject to saturation is synthesized to stabilize the
system. To make our basic idea clear, we first consider
the case of event-triggered state feedback, where the state
feedback signal in the saturation function is implemented
in an event-triggered way in the sense that the control is

piece-wise constant and it chooses instants to update by

checking the violation of a certain triggering condition.
Results are extended to a more general case where the full
state is not available. More specifically, the sensed outputs
are discretilized by an event-triggered mechanism, and
transmitted to an observer, which is properly designed to
give an estimate of the plant state. Then the observers
states are transmitted also in an event-triggered way to
the saturation unit, giving rise to saturated discrete-time
signals, which are synthesized into a controller to stabilize the systems. Here, the problem of simultaneously
deriving stabilizing event-triggered controllers and tackling saturation nonlinearity is cast into standard linear
matrix inequality (LMI) problem. Different from [8,11],
to reduce the dimension of the LMIs, we do not apply the
technique of enlarging the design space to deal with saturation nonlinearity, but instead we adopt the method of
placing saturation nonlinearity into the convex hull of a
group of linear feedbacks [7].
It is well known, on the one hand, that Zeno phenomena should be avoided in the event-triggered scheme.
To this end, event-triggered algorithms in observer design
and controller design have been shown to bear positive
lower bounds for inter-execution times. It is also well
known, on the other hand, that event-trigger algorithms
require continuously checking of the violation of certain
triggering conditions. To reduce the computation complexity, we propose a self-triggered scheme in the sense
that the next event time, at which the control law updates,
can be calculated by using only the systems state evaluated at previous event times, without requiring state
values between the control updates.

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

W. Ni et al.: Event-Triggered Control of Linear Systems with Saturated Inputs

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

Section II contains some some preliminaries and
Section III, the problem formulation. The main results of
the paper are included in Section IV and Section V, where
Section IV concerns event-triggered control via saturated
state feedback and Section V deals with event-triggered
control via saturated observer-based feedback. Illustrative examples are presented in Section VI. Section VII
presents a brief conclusion.

II. PRELIMINARIES
Notation. Let N denote the set of nature numbers, i.e.,
N = {0, 1, 2, }. Let R denote the set of real numbers,
and Rn , Rmn denote the sets of n-dimensional real vectors and m n real matrices, respectively. Let I denote the
identity matrix whose dimension is clear from the context. By P > 0 (P < 0) we mean that the matrix P is
symmetric and positive (negative) definite. For a vector
x = (x1 , , xn )T Rn , let x denote its Euclidean

norm, i.e., x = x21 + + x2n , and let x denote its

infinity norm, i.e., x = maxi=1,,n |xi |. For a square
matrix M, let M denote the matrix norm induced by
the Euclidean vector norm. The scaler saturation function with upper bound c, satc (), is defined as satc (s) =
sign(s) min{c, |s|}, and the vector saturation function
is defined as satc (u) = [satc (u1 ), satc (u2 ), , satc (um )]T
with u = [u1 , u2 , , um ]T Rm . For a group of points,
p1 , p2 , , pl , the convex
hull of these points is defined}as
{
l
l
co{pk |k = 1, 2, , l} =
k=1 k pk | k=1 k = 1, k 0 .
We also present some lemmas for later use. Let
be the set of m m diagonal matrices whose diagonal
elements are either 1 or 0. There are 2m elements in .

Suppose that all elements of are labeled as D+j , j =

{1, 2, , 2m }. Denote Dj = I D+j , j . With these, a
property with regard to the saturation function is shown
as follows.
Lemma 1. [7] Let u, v Rm be given with u =
(u1 , u2 , , um )T and v = (v1 , v2 , , vm )T . Suppose
v c, where c is the upper bound of saturation
function defined before. Then
{
}
satc (u) co D+j u + Dj v|j .
The following lemma is a local version of the corresponding global result of converging input converging
state. The readers are referred to [16,17] for details.

Lemma 2. [16,17] Let x = 0 be an equilibrium point for

the system x(t)

= f (x(t)) and suppose the existence and

uniqueness conditions of solutions on [t0 , +) are satisfied. If x = 0 is locally asymptotically stable in Rn ,

satisfying limt x(t)
= 0,
then , for any given signal x(t)
one can conclude that the trajectory of the differential
with initial state in satisfies
system x = f (x) + x(t)
limt x(t) = 0.

III. PROBLEM FORMULATION

The problems of event-triggered control of linear
systems with both saturated state feedback and saturated
observer-based feedback are formulated.
3.1 Event-triggered control via saturated state feedback
Consider the following linear system with saturated
inputs,
= Ax(t) + Bsat(u(t)),
x(t)

(1)

where x [0, +) Rn is the state, u [0, +) Rm

is the control input, and A Rnn , B Rnm are system
matrices. For ease of presentation, we assume in what follows that the upper bound for the saturation function is
c = 1 and the subscript c is dropped. The signals of state
feedback controller Kx(t) with a user-designed matrix
K Rmn are transmitted in a discrete manner to the
actuator at times tk , k N, producing an event-triggered
controller
u(t) = Kx(tk ), t [tk , tk+1 ), k N.

(2)

When k = 0, t0 denotes the initial instant and x(t0 )

denotes the initial condition. One sees that this scheme
generates a sporadic sequence of controller updating.
The times tk , k N, called event times, are specified by
those instants when a certain triggering condition is violated. The triggering condition adopted in this paper is
based on the state error and takes the form of

e e(t) < x x(t),

(3)
where e(t) = x(tk ) x(t), t [tk , tk+1 ) is the gap associated with the kth event time and e , x are user-designed
matrices and is a user-designed positive parameter.
Then, the event times are produced as follows:
t0 = 0,

{
}
tk+1 = inf t|t > tk , e e(t) x x(t) , k N.
The time sequence {tk }kN represents the instants at
which the controller (2) is updated.
The above event-triggered control scheme shows
that the actuation is performed when needed rather than

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

continuously or periodically. Specifically, the control is

executed when the gap between the current and the most
recently measured state, which equals zero at each event
time and grows soon after, exceeds a specified threshold.
The constraint in the triggering condition (3) can be
viewed as a state-dependent threshold condition, which
is chosen in a way that preserves stability. There are
many types of triggering conditions such as those based
on state error [18], input error [4], or Lyapunov functions
[13]. Now, we formulate the problem as follows:
Problem A. Design a feedback gain matrix K and an
event-triggering condition (3) such that the system (1)
under event-triggered controller (2) is asymptotically
stable.
3.2 Event-triggered control via saturated
observer-based feedback
This section considers the more general case where
the full state is not available. Refer to Fig. 1 and consider
now the following saturated control system:
= Ax(t) + Bsat(u(t)),
x(t)
y(t) = Cx(t),

(4)

where y Rp is the output which is transmitted only at

some discrete times sk , k N, to an observer
]
[

+ L y(sk ) C x(t)
+ Bsat(u(t)),
x(t)
= Ax(t)

(5)

where L Rnp is the observer gain matrix to be designed

later. The times, sk , k N, are specified when the following triggering condition

ey ey (t) < y y (y(t) C x(t))

(6)

is violated, i.e.,
s0 = 0,

sk+1 = inf t|t > sk , ey ey (t)

, k N,
y y (y(t) C x(t))

where ey (t) = y(sk ) y(t), t [sk , sk+1 ), ey , y are

matrices of appropriate dimensions, and y is a positive
number to be designed later. Note the information for the
triggering condition design includes only the output and
the observer state.
The observer state is further transmitted in a discrete manner by another event-triggered mechanism to
the saturated controller, taking the form of

k ), t [k , k+1 ), k N,
u(t) = Ko x(

(7)

where Ko Rmn is a matrix to be designed later, and the

event times k , k N, are specified when the following
triggering condition

e e (t) < o x y(t)

(8)

is violated, i.e.,
0 = 0,

{
}

k+1 = inf t|t > k , e e (t) o x y(t) , k N,

k ) x(t),

t [k , k+1 ), e , x are matrices

where e (t) = x(
of appropriate dimensions, and o is a positive number.
Now the problem in this subsection can be formulated
as follows:
Problem B. Design the triggering conditions (6), (8) and
gain matrices Ko and L such that the closed-loop system
(4) under (7) and (5) is asymptotically stable.
We now divide Problem B into two sub-problems.
Defining the error between observers state and the
= x(t)
x(t), the dynamics of x can
plants state as x(t)
be obtained as

+ Ley (t),
x(t)
= (A LC)x(t)

(9)

and the dynamics of x can be obtained as

= Ax(t) + Bsat(Ko x(t) + Ko e (t) + Ko x(t)).

x(t)
(10)
Putting (9) and (10) together and adopting the idea
included in Lemma 2, it can be seen that solving Problem
B is transformed into the stabilization of (9) and (11)
below:
= Ax(t) + Bsat(Ko x(t) + Ko e (t)).
x(t)

(11)

Note that the stabilization of (11), similar to Problem

A, is roughly an event-triggered state feedback problem,
where the triggering condition is imposed on e (t) and
it is output based. Based on the above consideration,
solving Problem B is divided into the following two subproblems: an event-triggered state estimation problem
and an event-triggered state feedback problem.
Problem B-I. Design an observer gain matrix L and an
event-triggering condition (6) such that the system (9) is
asymptotically stable.

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

W. Ni et al.: Event-Triggered Control of Linear Systems with Saturated Inputs

Problem B-II. Design a feedback matrix Ko and

an event-triggering condition (8) such that (11) is
asymptotically stable.
Remark 1. Note that the equation (1) in Problem A can
= Ax(t) + Bsat(Kx(t) + Ke(t)), which
be rewritten as x(t)
takes a similar form as the equation (11) in Problem
B-II. The difference is that Problem A imposes triggering condition on e(t) and it is state based, while Problem
B-II imposes triggering condition on e (t) which is output
based. The method of transforming Problem B into the
pair of Problem B-I and Problem B-II is similar to the
separation principle in optimal control.

IV. EVENT-TRIGGERED CONTROL VIA

SATURATED STATE FEEDBACK

V max
j

4.1 Event-triggered stabilization

The system (1) under event-triggered state feedback
becomes
= Ax(t) + Bsat(Kx(tk )).
x(t)

(12)

To deal with the saturation

{ nonlinearity, Lemma 1 is used
}
to give sat(Kx(tk )) D+j Kx(tk ) + Dj Hx(t)|j if
Hx 1 for a matrix H Rmn . Let P be a positive definite matrix to be designed such that the ellipsoid
{x|xT Px 1} is an invariant set of the closed-loop
system (12) and such that
{

} {
}
x|xT Px 1 x| Hx 1 .

(13)

If one chooses initial state x0 {x|xT Px 1},then any

trajectory x(t) with initial state x0 stays in {x|xT Px 1}
and consequently Hx(t) 1 is satisfied for all t >
0. Therefore, the system (12) can be put in the following
form:
{[
(
)]
}
x co A + B D+j K + Dj H x + BD+j Ke|j .
We now give a sufficient condition for the stability of
this differential inclusion. Let V (x) = xT Px, whose time
derivative along the trajectories of above system satisfy:

{ [
(
)]
x
P A + B D+j K + Dj H
T

)]T }
[
(
P x
+ A + B D+j K + Dj H
}
+ 2xT PBD+j Ke .

Using the fact that

2xT PBD+j Ke xT PBD+j BT Px + eT K T Ke,
and imposing the triggering condition

Ke(t) < Px(t),

(14)

one has

)]
{ [
(
V max xT P A + B D+j K + Dj H
j

This section is devoted to Problem A. Furthermore,

a positive lower bound for inter-event times will be provided, showing the proposed event-triggered mechanism
can be implemented without causing Zeno phenomena.
Self-triggered control is also considered.

[
(
)]T
+ A + B D+j K + Dj H
P
}
+ PBD+j BT P + P2 x.

A sufficient condition for negative definiteness of V is

)] [
(
)]T
[
(
P A + B D+j K + Dj H + A + B D+j K + Dj H
P
+ PBD+j BT P + P2 < 0, j ,
which, by left and right multiplying P1 on both sides of
the inequality and by denoting X = P1 , Y = KX , and
Z = HX , can be transformed into the following LMIs:
AX + XAT + BD+j Y + Y T D+j BT + BDj Z
+ ZT Dj BT + BD+j BT + I < 0, j .

(15)

Therefore, the saturated control of the system (12)

via event-triggered state feedback can be tackled by finding solutions to (13) and (15). Before presenting the result
in this section, we also reformulate the condition (13) in
terms of LMIs. Denote by hi the ith row of the matrix H,
where 1 i m. Note that the condition (13) holds if
and only if all the hyperplanes hi x = 1, 1 i m, lie
completely outside of the ellipsoid {x|xT Px 1}, i.e., at
each point x on the hyperplane hi x = 1, 1 i m, we
have xT Px 1. This means that the constraint (13) is
equivalent to
}
{
minn xT Px|hi x = 1 1, 1 i m.
xR

By using the Lagrangian multiplier method the minimum

can be calculated as
{
} [
]1
minn xT Px|hi x = 1 = hi P1 hTi
, 1 i m.
xR

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Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

are lower bounded by a positive number. This is proved

in the following theorem.

Consequently, constraint (13) is equivalent to

hi P1 hTi 1, 1 i m.
By Schur complement [22], the above inequalities are
equivalent to
(
)
1 hi P1
0, 1 i m.
P1 hTi P1

Theorem 2. Suppose the conditions of Theorem 1 hold.

Then the inter-event times, {ti+1 ti }, k N, defined
above are lower bounded by a positive number .
2

Proof. Denote e = Ke, x = Px, and y(t) = e(t)2 x(t)

.
Then

dy 2eT e x T x 2eT e x T x
=
dt
4
x
2

e
e + 2 e x
2
2
3
x
x
2

e
x + 2 e x
=2
2
3
x
x
(
) x
=2
y + y .

Noting that P = X 1 , K = YX 1 , H = ZX 1 , the above

constraint is exact
)
(
1 zi
0, 1 i m,
(16)
zTi X
where zi is the i-th row of the matrix Z.
The above analysis is summarized in the following
theorem.
Theorem 1. For the system (12), if there exists a set
of solutions {X > 0, Y , > 0} to the LMIs
(15) and (16), then under the event-triggered feedback u(t) = Kx(tk ), t [tk , tk+1 ), k N with
the gain matrix K = YX 1 and with the event
times tk , k N given by violating the triggering
condition (14), the closed-loop system (12) is locally
asymptotically stable.
Remark 2. As for the event-triggered control of linear
systems with saturated inputs proposed in [8,11], the
feedback gain matrix K is pre-given based on the criterion that A + BK is Hurwitz, and then the rest of desired
design variables are obtained by solving some LMIs in
which K is viewed as a constant matrix. This is similar to the emulation-based method [14]. However, in our
paper, the matrix K, together with other design variables,
is computed simultaneously by solving LMIs. This treatment allows us to have more design freedom to obtain an
optimal design (for example, achieving minimum number of controller executions) of the combined feedback
controller and triggering mechanism. This optimization
problem deserves intensive study (see for example [5]) and
it is not the focus of this paper.
4.2 Lower bound for inter-event times
In order that the event-triggered control policy in
the last subsection is applicable, it is necessary to show
that the inter-event times tk+1 tk , k N, where
t0 = 0,

{
}
tk+1 = inf t|t > tk , Ke(t) Px(t) , k N,

It follows from K = YP, H = ZP and the definition of

e that
x,
[
(
)]
}
{
x =
kj P A + B D+j K + Dj H x + PBD+j Ke
j

}
[
(
)]
kj P AP1 + B D+j Y + Dj Z x + PBD+j e ,

where

kj = 1, kj 0, j . Therefore,

{ ( [
(
)]

(
)
dy
1
+

kj
P
AP
2 y+y
+
B
D
Y
+
D
Z

j
j
dt

j
)}

+ PBD+j y

)
(
)(
2
y+y c+d y

= 2a1 y + 2a2 y + 2a3 y32 ,

[ 1
where a1 = c, a2 = c + d, a3 = d, c = maxj
P AP +

)]
(

+
+

B Dj Y + Dj Z , d = maxj PBDj . Thus the

solution y(t) of this differential inequality with initial

condition y(0) = 0 is, according to comparison principle, dominated by
the solution (t) of the differential
equation = 2a1 + 2a2 + 2a3 32 with the same
initial condition (0) = 0, i.e., y(t) (t). Noting that
the minimal time between events is given by the time it
takes for y(t) to evolve from the value 0 to , this time
is obviously no smaller than that time for (t) evolving from the value 0 to . Since the solution (t) can be
obtained as

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

W. Ni et al.: Event-Triggered Control of Linear Systems with Saturated Inputs

|
|
|
|
|| ln||c +c||ln||d +c|| ||
|
| , c d;
|
cd
|
t = |
|
2
2

c = d,
c+d c+d+2d ,

maxj A + Bj x(tk )

maxj A + Bj + maxj BD+j K

(
((

e(t)

exp

)
)
)

+ max BD+j K (t tk ) 1 .

one has

max A + Bj

|| ln|c +c|ln|d +c| || , c d;

|
cd
|
|
= |
2
2

c = d.
c+d c+d+2d

Letting t approach from left to tik+1 , one obtains

Consequently, > 0, which shows that inter-event

times have a strict positive lower bound.

e(t )
k+1

maxj A + Bj x(tk )

maxj A + Bj + maxj BD+j K

(
((
exp

Ke(t ) = Px(t ), k N,
k+1
k

(
)
where e tik+1 = limttk+1 ei (t).

(17)

The first inequality uses the fact that d(t)

dt
d(t)
d(t)2
d T (t)(t)
=
=
dt ; indeed, one the one hand,
dt
dt

T
(t)(t)
2(t) d(t)
; one the other hand, d dt
= 2(t) d(t)

dt
dt
d(t)
d(t)
d(t)
2(t) dt . Therefore, dt dt .

Note that
d

e(t) e(t)
= x(t)
dt
[
]
)

x(t)
+
BD
=
k
A
+
B
Ke(t)
j
j

j
j

[
]

(
)(
)
+

=
kj A+Bj x(tk )e(t) +BDj Ke(t)

max A + Bj x(tk )
j
(
)

+ max A + Bj + max BD+j K e(t).

j
j
Also noting that the initial condition is e(tk ) = 0,
solving the above differential inequality for e(t) yields

) )
)
+
+ max BDj K k 1 ,

4.3 Self-triggered control

Obviously, Theorem 1 requires continuous checking
of the violation of the triggering condition (14). To reduce
the computation complexity, we propose a self-triggered
scheme: the next event time, at which the control law
updates, can be calculated by using only the systems state
evaluated at the previous event time, without requiring
state values between the control updates. Denote j =
D+j K + Dj H, j . Under this scheme, the sequence of
event times {tk }kN satisfy

max A + Bj

where k = tk+1 tk . This, together with (17), implies

Px(tk ) Ke(tk+1 )
K maxj A + Bj x(tk )

maxj A + Bj + maxj BD+j K

(
((
exp
max A + Bj
j
)
) )

+ max BD+j K k 1 .

j
Solving the above algebraic inequality for k gives
(
ln
k

(
)

Px(tk ) maxj A+Bj +maxj BD+j K

j K maxj A+Bj x(tk )

)
+1

) .

maxj A + Bj + maxj BD+j K

Obviously, the sampling periods k , k N can never be

zero. Each k can be viewed as the lower bound for each
inter-event time tk+1 tk , k N. Let the event times
given by
t0 = 0, tk+1 = tk + k , k N.

(18)

Based on these analyses, we have the following theorem.

Theorem 3. For the system (12), if there exists a set of
solutions {X > 0, Y , > 0} to the LMIs (15) and (16),
then under the self-triggered feedback u(t) = Kx(tk ),
t [tk , tk+1 ), k N with K = YX 1 and tk , k
N given by (18), the closed-loop system (12) is locally
asymptotically stable.

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Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

V. EVENT-TRIGGERED CONTROL VIA

SATURATED OBSERVER-BASED FEEDBACK
This section is devoted to Problem B; that is, the
event triggered control of linear systems with saturated
observer-based feedback. As pointed out before, this
problem can be divided into Problem B-I and Problem
B-II.
Problem B-I concerns the design of a gain matrix
L and a triggering condition with the aim to achieve the
stability of the system (9). It can be approached as follows. By solving the following LMIs with variables X1 , Y1
and y
X1 A + AT X1 Y1 C C T Y1T + I + y C T C < 0,
X1 > 0,

y > 0,

(19)

the matrix L is obtained as L = X11 Y1 , and by defining

P1 = X1 , the triggering condition is proposed as

y(t) .
(20)
P1 Ley (t) y C x(t)
We show that these designs render the stability of the
system (9), shown in the following theorem.
Theorem 4. If there is a set of solution X1 , Y1 and y to
the LMIs (19), then the event-triggered observer (5) with
the event times sk , k N given by violating the triggering
condition (20) gives an asymptotical estimate of the state
of the system (4).
Proof. In order to show that the event-triggered observer
(5) under the triggering condition (20) gives an asymptotical estimate of the state of the system (4), we only need to
prove the asymptotical stability of their error system (9)
under the triggering condition (20). To this end, consider
= xT P1 x for the
the Lyapunov function candidate V1 (x)
system (9), and its time derivative can be calculated as
V 1 = xT [P1 (A LC) + (A LC)T P1 ]x + 2xT P1 Ley
xT [P1 (A LC) + (A LC)T P1 ]x + xT x

some LMIs, our joint design method is more plausible

to achieve an optimal design than the above sequential
design procedure would.
We proceed to Problem B-II. Note that by Lemma 1
one has
(
)
sat Ko x(t)
{ +(Ko e (t)
}
)
co D+j Ko x(t) + Ko e (t) + Dj Ho x(t)|j
if Ho x(t) 1, where Ho Rmn is a matrix to be
design later. Therefore,
{[
(
)]
co A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho x(t)
x(t)
}
(21)
+ BD+j Ko e (t)|j .
A sufficient condition for Ho x(t) 1, similar to the
analysis in Section 4.1, is that there exists a positive definite matrix P2 such that the ellipsoid {x|xT Px 1} is
an invariant set of the closed-loop system (4) and at the
same time
{ T
}
x|x P2 x 1 {x| Ho x 1}.
(22)
To obtain the matrix P2 > 0 satisfying (22) and the
gain matrices Ko , Ho , together with a triggering condition, such that the system (21) is asymptotically stable,
we first concern the stabilization for the dual system of
system (21), i.e.,
{[
)]T
(
co
x(t)
A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho
x(t)
}
(23)
+ BD+j Ko e (t)|j .
These matrices and the triggering condition can be constructed as follows. By solving the following LMIs with
variables X2 , Y2 , Z2 and o ,
X2 AT + AX2 + BD+j Y2 + Y2T D+j BT + BDj Z2

+ (P1 Ley )T (P1 Ley )

xT [P1 (A LC) + (A LC)T P1 + I + y C T C]x
]
[
= xT X1 A + AT1 X1 Y1 C C T Y1T + I + y C T C x
< 0, x 0.

+ Z2T Dj BT + I + o C T C < 0, j ,
(
)
1 zi2
0, 1 i m,
( i )T
z 2 X2
X2 > 0,

Therefore, the system (9) is asymptotically stable.

Remark 3. Unlike the result concerning the
event-triggered observer design in [3], where the matrix
L is pre-given such that the matrix A LC is Hurwitz
and the rest of design variables are obtained by solving

o > 0,

(24)

where zi2 is the i-th row of the matrix Z2 , the matrix

Ko , Ho are obtained as Ko = Y2 X21 , Ho = Z2 X21 , and by
defining P2 = X2 , the triggering condition is proposed as

max P2 BD+j Ko e (t) o y(t).

(25)

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W. Ni et al.: Event-Triggered Control of Linear Systems with Saturated Inputs

[
(
)]T [
)]
(
We show that these designs render the stability of the
P2 A+B D+j Ko + Dj Ho
+ A+B D+j Ko +Dj Ho P2
differential inclusion (23). To this end, consider the Lyapunov candidate V2 (x) = xT P2 x, and calculate its time
+ I + o C T C < 0, j ,
(26)
derivative along the trajectory of system (23)
}
{ [ [
(
)]T [
(
)] ]
T
+

T
+

V 2 max x P2 A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho
+ A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho P2 x + 2x P2 BDj Ko e
j
{ [ [
(
(
)]T [
)] ]
T
+

+ A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho P2 x
max x P2 A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho
j
(
)T (
)}
+ xT xT + P2 BD+j Ko e
P2 BD+j Ko e
{ {[ [
} }
(
)]T [
)] ]
(
P2 A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho
max xT
+ A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho P2 + I + o C T C x .
j

By referring to the LMIs on the first line of (24), which

is equivalent to

one sees that V 2 < 0. Thus, system (23) is asymptotically

stable.

(a) Time evolution of the state under the eventtriggered state feedback
4

The state

2
0
2
4
6
8
0

10

12

Time(s)

||Ke(t)|| and 1/2||Px(t)||

(b) Illustration of the triggering condition under the eventtriggered state feedback
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

10

Time(s)

The saturated input

(c) Time evolution of saturated input under the eventtriggered state feedback
1
0.5
0
0.5
1
0

0.5

1.5

2.5

Time(s)

Fig. 2. Event-triggered control under state feedback.

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3.5

Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

We then come back to the design for the original

nm
system (21) in (Problem
) B-II. Let
( N T R) be a matrix
T
such that rank P2 C = rank P2 C , N , which ensures
the existence of a matrix solution M Rpm to the matrix
equation P2 C T M = N. We show that the stability of the
system (21) is achieved under the above designed matrices
Ko , Ho and the triggering condition

(27)
max BD+j Ko e (t) o M T y(t).

Problem B-II can be solved in the following

theorem.
Theorem 5. If there exists a set of solutions X2 , Y2 , o to
the LMIs (24), then the gain matrix Ko = Y2 X21 , Ho =
Z2 X21 and the triggering condition (27) render the stability of the system (21).

Proof. For the system (21), consider the Lyapunov candidate V = xT P21 x, whose time derivative satisfies
{ [
]
}
[
(
)] [
(
)]T
P21 x + 2xT P21 BD+j Ko e
V = max xT P21 A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho + A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho
j
{ [
]
[
(
)] [
(
)]T
T
1
+

1
P2 x
max x P2 A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho + A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho
j
}
(
)T (
)
+ xT P22 x + BD+j Ko e
BD+j Ko e
{
}
[
(
)] [
(
)]T
max xT P21 A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho + A + B D+j Ko + Dj Ho
P21 + P22 + o P21 C T CP21 x
j
}
{[
(
)]
[
(
)]T
T 1
+

T
= max x P2
+ I + o C C P21 x.
A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho P2 + P2 A + B Dj Ko + Dj Ho
j

(a) Time evolution of the state under selftriggered state feedback

4

The state

2
0
2
4
6
8

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Time(s)

(b) Illustration of the triggering condition under selftriggered state feedback

The norm of Ke(t)

3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Time(s)

The saturated input

(c) Time evolution of saturated input under the selftriggered state feedback
1
0.5
0
0.5
1
0

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Fig. 3. Self-triggered control under state feedback.

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W. Ni et al.: Event-Triggered Control of Linear Systems with Saturated Inputs

(a) Time evolution of the state under the eventtriggered observerbased feedback
4
The first component of the state
The second component of the state

The state

0
2
4
6
8
10

10

12

Time(s)

(b) Illustration of the triggering condition for sensorobserver communication under the
Functions in triggering condition

eventtriggered observerbased feedback

14
Function on the left hand side of triggering condition
Function on the right hand side of triggering condition

12
10
8
6
4
2
0

10

Time(s)

Functions in the triggering condition

(c) Illustration of the triggering condition for the observercontroller communication under
eventtriggered observerbased feedback
14
Function on the left hand side of the triggering condition
Function on the right hand side of the triggering condition

12
10
8
6
4
2
0

10

Time(s)

(d) Time evolution of saturated input under the eventtriggered observerbased feedback
The saturated input

1
0.5
0

0.5
1
0

0.5

1.5

2.5

Time(s)

Fig. 4. Event-triggered control under observer-based feedback.

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Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 113, July 2015

By referring to (26), one sees that V is negative definite

and therefore, the system (21) is asymptotically stable.
Remark 4. Event-triggered control via saturated
observer-based feedback is realized by combining
Theorem 4 with Theorem 5, where the observer is also
event-triggered type. Available results only consider
event-triggered control via state feedback.
Remark 5. By arguing in a similar manner as in
Section IV, the event-triggered sensing and eventtriggered controller proposed in this section can be
shown to have positive lower bounds, and furthermore, self-triggered schemes for these two triggering
approaches can also be obtained. To avoid the repeatability of the method used before and to save space, all these
issues are not treated again in this section.

VI. SIMULATION RESULTS

Consider the saturated linear control system (4)
with

(
A=

1.7741 0.4815
7.6837 2.0741

( )
(
)
8
,B =
,C = 6 9 .
8

The upper bound for the saturation function is chosen to be c = 1. For the state feedback case, the gain
matrices K, H and the parameter can be, by solving the LMIs (15)-(16) with D+1 = diag(1, 1), D+2 =
diag(0, 1), D+3 = diag(1, 0), D+4 = diag(0, 0), D1 =
diag(0, 0), D2 = diag(1, 0), D3 = diag(0, 1), D4 =
diag(1, 1) in (15) and i = 1 in (16), obtained as follows K = (46.8096, 23.6373), H = (4.3415, 2.6915),
and = 0.3004. And for the observer-based feedback case, the gain matrices L, Ko , Ho and the parameters y , o can be, by solving the LMIs (19) and (24)
with j = 1, 2, 3, 4, i = 1 in (24), obtained as follows
L = (0.4233, 7.6559)T , Ko = (1.8476, 1.2671), Ho =
(1.2527, 0.6547), and y = 0.95, o = 0.82. Note that
a saturated inputs system is only locally stabilizable. For
simulation, we choose the initial condition as x0 = (4, 4)T
and x 0 = (3, 5)T .
The simulation result for the case of event-triggered
state feedback is shown in Fig. 2, from which one sees
that the trajectory is convergent, shown in 2a, and the
control input is actually saturated, shown in 2c. The triggering condition (14) is illustrated in 2b which depicts the
time evolution of functions on both sides of (14), with the
meaning that the controller (2) is invoked when the blue
curve hits the red one.
The simulation for the case of self-triggered state
feedback is shown in Fig. 3. Although the self-triggered

control, compared with the event-triggered case, has the

advantage that it does not continuously check the triggering condition (14) but determines the next execution
time by calculating a function of the last measurement
of the state, it samples more frequently than with an
event-triggered control since the inter-event times are
estimated in a conservative way, shown in Fig. 3b. The
more frequently the controller samples, the higher performance (for example, the higher convergent rate) the
system achieves; this fact has been pointed out in [5] and
it is illustrated in Fig. 3a. The control in self-triggered
case is also saturated, shown in 3c.
For the case of event-triggered observer-based feedback, Fig. 4 depicts the time evolution the state of the
plant and the observer (Fig. 4a), time evolution of the
functions on both sides of the triggering conditions (20)
(Fig. 4b), time evolution of the functions on both sides
of the triggering conditions (27) (Fig. 4c), and time evolution of the saturated input (Fig. 4d).

VII. CONCLUSION
For linear systems with saturated inputs, eventtriggered state feedback is firstly considered. We also
study the event-triggered control via observer-based
feedback, where the observer is constructed also in an
event-triggered form and it is used to estimate the systems state. Positive lower bounds for inter-event times are
obtained and self-triggered schemes are presented. The
method of placing saturation nonlinearity into the convex hull of a group of linear feedbacks is adopted to deal
with saturated control which is challenge to control theory. The convergence analysis is carried out both with
proofs and simulations.

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Wei Ni received his Ph.D. in systems science from Academy of Mathematics and
Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010. He is currently Lecturer
with School of Science, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China. His research
interests include control of switched and
impulsive systems, complex systems, etc.
Ping Zhao received his Ph.D. from the
Academy of Mathematics and Systems
Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in
2008. He is currently a teacher at the University of Jinan. His research interests are
in stability theory and control of stochastic and nonlinear systems.
Xiaoli Wang received her Ph.D. from
the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2010. She is currently Lecturer
with School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology at Weihai, Weihai, China. Her
research interests include system modeling and multiagent systems.
Jinhuan Wang received her Ph.D. degree
from the Academy of Mathematics and
Systems Science, Chinese Academy of
Sciences in 2008. She is currently Associate Professor of the School of Sciences,
Hebei University of Technology, China.
Her research interests include complex
systems control, switched systems.

2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd