Guest Editorial

Special Section on Distributed Event-Triggered Control and Estimation in Resource-Constrained Cooperative Networks

The ever-increasing demand for guaranteeing a realization of coordinated tasks in several practical applications, such as wireless robotics, environmental monitoring systems, smart grids and intelligent transportation systems, has stimulated widespread research interest in developing networked distributed control and estimation strategies. Employing a networked distributed estimation and control strategy for a cooperative network of nodes or agents offers several benefits including flexibility, manipulability, and scalability that are beyond the capability of an individual node or an agent. Nevertheless, practical nodes or agents often suffer from limited sensing, computing and communication resources, and network bandwidth sometimes may also be restricted. These constraints pose significant challenges to the analysis and synthesis of practical cooperative networks. Event-triggered technology and methodology, which abandon the conventional periodic execution of task commands, have been proven to be an effective and promising tool capable of alleviating network bandwidth occupancy and reducing computation/communication cost while maintaining the desired estimation and control performance.