Safe and Efficient Switching Controller Design for Partially Observed Linear-Gaussian Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a switching control strategy for partially observed linear-Gaussian systems that guarantees safety and efficiency, balancing high performance and stability with provable guarantees.

Contribution

It develops a novel switching control method with performance guarantees for partially observed systems, addressing a gap in existing research.

Findings

System's quadratic cost remains bounded under switching.

Performance loss diminishes super-exponentially when the uncertified controller is stabilizing.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Abstract

Switching control strategies that unite a potentially high-performance but uncertified controller and a stabilizing albeit conservative controller are shown to be able to balance safety with efficiency, but have been less studied under partial observation of state. To address this gap, we propose a switching control strategy for partially observed linear-Gaussian systems with provable performance guarantees. We show that the proposed switching strategy is both safe and efficient, in the sense that: (1) the linear-quadratic cost of the system is always bounded even if the original uncertified controller is destabilizing; (2) in the case when the uncertified controller is stabilizing, the performance loss induced by the conservativeness of switching converges super-exponentially to zero. The effectiveness of the switching strategy is also demonstrated via numerical simulation on the Tennessee Eastman Process.