Symmetry Reduction of Optimal Control Systems and Principal Connections

This paper explores the role of symmetries and reduction in nonlinear control and optimal control systems. The focus of the paper is to give a geometric framework of symmetry reduction of optimal control systems as well as to show how to obtain explicit expressions of the reduced system by exploiting the geometry. In particular, we show how to obtain a principal connection to be used in the reduction for various choices of symmetry groups, as opposed to assuming such a principal connection is given or choosing a particular symmetry group to simplify the setting. Our result synthesizes some previous works on symmetry reduction of nonlinear control and optimal control systems. Affine and kinematic optimal control systems are of particular interest: We explicitly work out the details for such systems and also show a few examples of symmetry reduction of kinematic optimal control problems.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Reduction in optimal control with broken symmetry for collision and obstacle avoidance of multi-agent system on Lie groups

We study the reduction by symmetry for optimality conditions in optimal control problems of left-invariant affine multi-agent control systems, with partial symmetry breaking cost functions for continuous-time and discrete-time systems. We recast the optimal control problem as a constrained variational problem with a partial symmetry breaking Lagrangian and obtain the reduced optimality conditions from a reduced variational principle via symmetry reduction techniques in both settings, continuous-time, and discrete-time. We apply the results to a collision and obstacle avoidance problem for multiple vehicles evolving on $SE(2)$ in the presence of a static obstacle.Comment: 20 page

Symmetry reduction and recovery of trajectories of optimal control problems via measure relaxations

We address the problem of symmetry reduction of optimal control problems under the action of a finite group from a measure relaxation viewpoint. We propose a method based on the moment-SOS aka Lasserre hierarchy which allows one to significantly reduce the computation time and memory requirements compared to the case without symmetry reduction. We show that the recovery of optimal trajectories boils down to solving a symmetric parametric polynomial system. Then we illustrate our method on the symmetric integrator and the time-optimal inversion of qubits.Comment: 38 pages, 23 figure