Data as models? A closer look at data-driven control systems.

Abstract: The resurgence of data-driven dynamic models offers the tantalising prospect of being able to implement feedback controllers directly from measurements of the trajectories of the system to be controlled. Data-enabled predictive control (DeePC), data-driven predictive control (DDPC), and similar variants circumvent the traditional approach of identifying a dynamic model as an intermediate step in the control design process. Such approaches require regularisation to trade off between the estimation and control objectives. Another weakness is the inability to effectively handle unmeasured disturbances. We take a somewhat different view here that the data matrices used for data-driven control are themselves models (signal matrix models) that use the system trajectories as the representation. We will use this approach to construct Kalman filters and optimal predictive controllers. Regularisation is no longer necessary and unmeasured disturbances can be effectively controlled.

Bio: Roy Smith is an emeritus Professor in the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zurich) in Switzerland. From 1990 to 2010 he was on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Dept. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his undergraduate education at Canterbury University in New Zealand (1980) and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (1990). Roy Smith’s research interests include: the identification and control of uncertain systems, and distributed estimation, communication and control systems. His application experience includes: process control, automotive engines, flexible space structures, aeromanoeuvring Mars entry vehicles, formation flying of spacecraft, magnetically levitated bearings, high energy accelerator control, airborne wind energy and multi-source energy hub/building control. He has been a long time consultant to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on guidance, navigation and control aspects of interplanetary and deep space science spacecraft. He is a Fellow of the IEEE & IFAC, an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, and a member of SIAM and NZAC.

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