Dual Control of Linear Systems from Bilinear Observations with Belief Space Model Predictive Control
Authors: Daniel Cao, Beixi Du, Andrew Lowitt, Sunmook Choi, Sarah Dean, Yahya Sattar
Organizations: Cornell
Abstract
We study finite-horizon quadratic control of linear systems with bilinear observations, in which the control input affects not only the state dynamics but also the partial observations of the state. In this setting, the separation principle can fail because control inputs influence the future quality of state estimates. State estimation requires an input-dependent Kalman filter whose gain and error covariance evolve as functions of the control inputs. To address this challenge, we propose a belief-space model predictive control (B-MPC) method that plans directly over both the estimated state and its error covariance. In particular, B-MPC plans with a deterministic surrogate of the belief evolution defined by the input-dependent Kalman filter. Through numerical experiments in two synthetic settings, we show that B-MPC can outperform both the separation-principle controller and its MPC variant in favorable regimes, and that these gains are accompanied by lower estimation covariance and more uncertainty-aware action choices.
Koopman-based neural MPC models generate time-varying dynamics from historical data, but preserve convexity by enforcing that the system operator is independent of the current control input. This conditional independence constraint limits adaptation to changing dynamics within a single MPC horizon, particularly under time-varying conditions and under stale-plan execution. We propose Bilinear Mamba-Koopman Neural MPC, a minimal extension that introduces control-dependent coupling in the latent dynamics, allowing the effective operator to adapt to the current input. The resulting model is a strict generalization of the standard linear, conditional-independence formulation, adds less than 1% parameters through a low-rank structure, and admits exact model Jacobians that enable efficient Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) with monotone-descent and KKT convergence results under standard trust-region assumptions. Across CartPole and RSCP benchmarks in time-invariant and time-varying regimes, the proposed model matches or improves forecasting accuracy on every cell when training noise is averaged out, with strict gains where control-state coupling is structurally present. Its main closed-loop gains appear in the RSCP TV task, where iterative SCP improves adaptation within the horizon and substantially stabilizes training; in CartPole TV, the gains are modest but consistent. In delayed re-planning experiments on the time-varying variants, the bilinear model degrades more gracefully under stale-plan execution, maintaining a consistent advantage on CartPole TV and a substantially larger robustness margin on RSCP TV. These results show that control-dependent latent dynamics provide a simple and effective mechanism for robust MPC under varying conditions.
Intermittent state measurements pose fundamental challenges to model predictive control of constrained nonlinear systems because prediction uncertainty grows during feedback outages and measurement-triggered resets disrupt nominal state propagation, potentially compromising closed-loop stability and recursive feasibility. This paper develops a Koopman-based stochastic MPC framework with probabilistically truncated soft constraints. Specifically, a Lipschitz-constrained deep Koopman model provides a linear latent predictor, enabling computationally efficient online optimization. The intermittent measurement process is modeled as a two-mode discrete-time Markov chain, yielding a unified Markov jump error model for open-loop propagation and measurement-triggered resets. Under numerically verifiable sufficient conditions, the prediction error is shown to be mean-square ultimately bounded, and an explicit uniform second-moment bound is obtained. A distribution-free probabilistic error radius is then constructed for a prescribed confidence level and used to truncate dropout-dependent constraint tightening. An exact-penalty soft-constraint mechanism accommodates reset-induced jumps and prolonged dropouts. Under the stated terminal compatibility and bounded-disturbance conditions, recursive feasibility and mean-square ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop regulation error are established. Numerical simulations on a visual-servoing tracking task corroborate these theoretical results and demonstrate effective tracking under stochastic measurement unavailability.
This paper investigates the control of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems subject to incomplete and corrupted measurements. Specifically, we focus on designing a Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller without relying on explicit state estimation. By leveraging minimum variance duality, our approach allows the current control input to be represented as a linear function of available measurements and previously applied inputs, successfully reducing the task to a tractable deterministic optimization problem. We provide theoretical justification for this framework and demonstrate its practical effectiveness through numerical experiments.