No Arabic abstract
State estimation is critical to control systems, especially when the states cannot be directly measured. This paper presents an approximate optimal filter, which enables to use policy iteration technique to obtain the steady-state gain in linear Gaussian time-invariant systems. This design transforms the optimal filtering problem with minimum mean square error into an optimal control problem, called Approximate Optimal Filtering (AOF) problem. The equivalence holds given certain conditions about initial state distributions and policy formats, in which the system state is the estimation error, control input is the filter gain, and control objective function is the accumulated estimation error. We present a policy iteration algorithm to solve the AOF problem in steady-state. A classic vehicle state estimation problem finally evaluates the approximate filter. The results show that the policy converges to the steady-state Kalman gain, and its accuracy is within 2 %.
While the topic of mean-field games (MFGs) has a relatively long history, heretofore there has been limited work concerning algorithms for the computation of equilibrium control policies. In this paper, we develop a computable policy iteration algorithm for approximating the mean-field equilibrium in linear-quadratic MFGs with discounted cost. Given the mean-field, each agent faces a linear-quadratic tracking problem, the solution of which involves a dynamical system evolving in retrograde time. This makes the development of forward-in-time algorithm updates challenging. By identifying a structural property of the mean-field update operator, namely that it preserves sequences of a particular form, we develop a forward-in-time equilibrium computation algorithm. Bounds that quantify the accuracy of the computed mean-field equilibrium as a function of the algorithms stopping condition are provided. The optimality of the computed equilibrium is validated numerically. In contrast to the most recent/concurrent results, our algorithm appears to be the first to study infinite-horizon MFGs with non-stationary mean-field equilibria, though with focus on the linear quadratic setting.
This paper considers the data-driven linear-quadratic regulation (LQR) problem where the system parameters are unknown and need to be identified in real time. Contrary to existing system identification and data-driven control methods, which typically require either offline data collection or multiple resets, we propose an online non-episodic algorithm that gains knowledge about the system from a single trajectory. The algorithm guarantees that both the identification error and the suboptimality gap of control performance in this trajectory converge to zero almost surely. Furthermore, we characterize the almost sure convergence rates of identification and control, and reveal an optimal trade-off between exploration and exploitation. We provide a numerical example to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy.
This paper focuses on the controller synthesis for unknown, nonlinear systems while ensuring safety constraints. Our approach consists of two steps, a learning step that uses Gaussian processes and a controller synthesis step that is based on control barrier functions. In the learning step, we use a data-driven approach utilizing Gaussian processes to learn the unknown control affine nonlinear dynamics together with a statistical bound on the accuracy of the learned model. In the second controller synthesis steps, we develop a systematic approach to compute control barrier functions that explicitly take into consideration the uncertainty of the learned model. The control barrier function not only results in a safe controller by construction but also provides a rigorous lower bound on the probability of satisfaction of the safety specification. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results by synthesizing a safety controller for a jet engine example.
This paper proposes the Deep Generalized Policy Iteration (DGPI) algorithm to find the infinite horizon optimal control policy for general nonlinear continuous-time systems with known dynamics. Unlike existing adaptive dynamic programming algorithms for continuous time systems, DGPI does not require the admissibility of initialized policy, and input-affine nature of controlled systems for convergence. Our algorithm employs the actor-critic architecture to approximate both policy and value functions with the purpose of iteratively solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Both the policy and value functions are approximated by deep neural networks. Given any arbitrary initial policy, the proposed DGPI algorithm can eventually converge to an admissible, and subsequently an optimal policy for an arbitrary nonlinear system. We also relax the update termination conditions of both the policy evaluation and improvement processes, which leads to a faster convergence speed than conventional Policy Iteration (PI) methods, for the same architecture of function approximators. We further prove the convergence and optimality of the algorithm with thorough Lyapunov analysis, and demonstrate its generality and efficacy using two detailed numerical examples.
The aim of this paper is to propose a new numerical approximation of the Kalman-Bucy filter for semi-Markov jump linear systems. This approximation is based on the selection of typical trajectories of the driving semi-Markov chain of the process by using an optimal quantization technique. The main advantage of this approach is that it makes pre-computations possible. We derive a Lipschitz property for the solution of the Riccati equation and a general result on the convergence of perturbed solutions of semi-Markov switching Riccati equations when the perturbation comes from the driving semi-Markov chain. Based on these results, we prove the convergence of our approximation scheme in a general infinite countable state space framework and derive an error bound in terms of the quantization error and time discretization step. We employ the proposed filter in a magnetic levitation example with markovian failures and compare its performance with both the Kalman-Bucy filter and the Markovian linear minimum mean squares estimator.