Event-triggered Robust Output Feedback Control of a Three-tank System

Abstract

An event-triggered robust output feedback control method is proposed for water level tracking of an uncertain three-tank system by using only the level sensor of the target tank. The system model is transformed into a canonical form with uncertainties by coordinate transformation, and the canonical system's state variables are estimated by a higher-order sliding mode differentiator based on the measurement of the target tank's water level. Then an event-triggered robust output feedback controller is constructed. The triggering condition is derived by taking the control gains and event-triggered sampling errors into account, and the control performance is rigorously analyzed. Furthermore, it is shown that the zeno behavior is also excluded. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental studies on a real three-tank system.