Design of minimax controllers for nonlinear systems using cost-to-come methods
This thesis develops and utilizes the cost-to-come methodology for the construction of minimax controllers for nonlinear systems with partial-state information (PSI), which are subjected to deterministic uncertainty. It introduces the notion of a cost-to-come function and shows how it leads to necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a minimax controller. These conditions are the existence of the cost-to-come function and the existence of a solution to an auxiliary full-information (FI) minimax problem. It is also proven that a solution of the FI problem leads directly to a solution of the original PSI problem. The significance of this result is that the auxiliary FI problem can be solved using better-known dynamic programming (DP) techniques.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign