Publications - Conference Paper

In this paper we consider the problem of optimal control (specifically, minimum-time steering) for systems with quantized inputs. In particular, we propose a new approach to the solution of the optimal control problem for an important class of nonlinear systems, i.e. chained-form systems. By exploiting results on the structure of the reachability set of these systems under quantized control, the optimal solution is determined solving an integer linear programming problem. Our algorithm represents an improvement with respect to classical approaches in terms of exactness, as it does not resort to any a priori state-space discretization. Although the computational complexity of the problem in our formulation is still formally exponential, it lends itself to application of Branch and Bound techniques, which substantially cuts down computations in many cases, as it has been experimentally observed.

This paper studies left invertibility of single-output discrete-time quantized linear systems. Quantized outputs are generated according to a given partition of the state-space, while inputs are sequences on a finite alphabet. Left invertibility deals with the possibility of recovering unknown inputs from the only knowledge of the outputs. It is reduced, under suitable conditions, to left D-invertibility: while left invertibility takes into account membership to sets of a given partition, left D-invertibility considers only membership to a single set, and is easily (and algorithmically) detectable. Our main result is a sufficient condition for the equivalence between left invertibility and left D-invertibility in MISO system. In unidimensional systems the equivalence is valid except at most a finite (and computable) number of cases. These results allows the effective detection of left invertibility by means of left Dinvertibility, which is algorithmically detectable. An example with effective computations is presented to show the application of the proposed method.