98 research outputs found
Simple Approximations of Semialgebraic Sets and their Applications to Control
Many uncertainty sets encountered in control systems analysis and design can
be expressed in terms of semialgebraic sets, that is as the intersection of
sets described by means of polynomial inequalities. Important examples are for
instance the solution set of linear matrix inequalities or the Schur/Hurwitz
stability domains. These sets often have very complicated shapes (non-convex,
and even non-connected), which renders very difficult their manipulation. It is
therefore of considerable importance to find simple-enough approximations of
these sets, able to capture their main characteristics while maintaining a low
level of complexity. For these reasons, in the past years several convex
approximations, based for instance on hyperrect-angles, polytopes, or
ellipsoids have been proposed. In this work, we move a step further, and
propose possibly non-convex approximations , based on a small volume polynomial
superlevel set of a single positive polynomial of given degree. We show how
these sets can be easily approximated by minimizing the L1 norm of the
polynomial over the semialgebraic set, subject to positivity constraints.
Intuitively, this corresponds to the trace minimization heuristic commonly
encounter in minimum volume ellipsoid problems. From a computational viewpoint,
we design a hierarchy of linear matrix inequality problems to generate these
approximations, and we provide theoretically rigorous convergence results, in
the sense that the hierarchy of outer approximations converges in volume (or,
equivalently, almost everywhere and almost uniformly) to the original set. Two
main applications of the proposed approach are considered. The first one aims
at reconstruction/approximation of sets from a finite number of samples. In the
second one, we show how the concept of polynomial superlevel set can be used to
generate samples uniformly distributed on a given semialgebraic set. The
efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by different numerical
examples
An Improved Constraint-Tightening Approach for Stochastic MPC
The problem of achieving a good trade-off in Stochastic Model Predictive
Control between the competing goals of improving the average performance and
reducing conservativeness, while still guaranteeing recursive feasibility and
low computational complexity, is addressed. We propose a novel, less
restrictive scheme which is based on considering stability and recursive
feasibility separately. Through an explicit first step constraint we guarantee
recursive feasibility. In particular we guarantee the existence of a feasible
input trajectory at each time instant, but we only require that the input
sequence computed at time remains feasible at time for most
disturbances but not necessarily for all, which suffices for stability. To
overcome the computational complexity of probabilistic constraints, we propose
an offline constraint-tightening procedure, which can be efficiently solved via
a sampling approach to the desired accuracy. The online computational
complexity of the resulting Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is similar
to that of a nominal MPC with terminal region. A numerical example, which
provides a comparison with classical, recursively feasible Stochastic MPC and
Robust MPC, shows the efficacy of the proposed approach.Comment: Paper has been submitted to ACC 201
Sequential Randomized Algorithms for Convex Optimization in the Presence of Uncertainty
In this paper, we propose new sequential randomized algorithms for convex
optimization problems in the presence of uncertainty. A rigorous analysis of
the theoretical properties of the solutions obtained by these algorithms, for
full constraint satisfaction and partial constraint satisfaction, respectively,
is given. The proposed methods allow to enlarge the applicability of the
existing randomized methods to real-world applications involving a large number
of design variables. Since the proposed approach does not provide a priori
bounds on the sample complexity, extensive numerical simulations, dealing with
an application to hard-disk drive servo design, are provided. These simulations
testify the goodness of the proposed solution.Comment: 18 pages, Submitted for publication to IEEE Transactions on Automatic
Contro
- …