Mode set focused hybrid estimation

Abstract

Estimating the state of a hybrid system means accounting for the mode of operation or failure and the current state of the continuously valued entities concurrently. Existing hybrid estimation schemes try to overcome the problem of an exponentially growing number of possible mode-sequence/continuous-state combinations by merging hypotheses and/or deducing likelihood measures to identify tractable sets of the most likely hypotheses. However, they still suffer from unnecessarily high computational costs as the number of possible modes increases. Hybrid diagnosis schemes, on the other hand, estimate the current mode of operation/failure only, thus leaving the continuous evolution of the system implicit. This paper proposes a novel scheme that uses a combination of both the approaches in order to define posterior transition probabilities between the specified modes of the hybrid system, hence focusing better on relevant hypotheses. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the algorithm is applied to a satellite attitude control system and compared with existing hybrid estimation/diagnosis schemes, such as the Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm, a purely parity based method (HyDiag), and an existing hybrid Mode Estimation (hME) algorithm.