2023/10/19 by Aayushman Sharma, Sharma, Aayushman, Suman Chakravorty +1
Engineering · #Advanced Control Systems Optimization #Control Systems and Identification #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Fault Detection and Control Systems #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.13147
openalex publication_date 2023/10/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we study the use of state-of-the-art nonlinear system identification techniques for the optimal control of nonlinear systems. We show that the nonlinear systems identification problem is equivalent to estimating the generalized moments of an underlying sampling distribution and is bound to suffer from ill-conditioning and variance when approximating a system to high order, requiring samples combinatorial-exponential in the order of the approximation, i.e., the global nature of the approximation. We show that the iterative identification of "local" linear time varying (LTV) models around the current estimate of the optimal trajectory, coupled with a suitable optimal control algorithm such as iterative LQR (ILQR), is necessary as well as sufficient, to accurately solve the underlying optimal control problem.