Contributions to the Theory of Optimal Control

THIS is one of the two ground-breaking papers by Kalman that appeared in 1960—with the other one (discussed next) being the filtering and prediction paper. This first paper, which deals with linear-quadratic feedback control, set the stage for what came to be known as LQR (Linear-Quadratic-Regulator) control, while the combination of the two papers formed the basis for LQG (Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian) control. Both LQR and LQG control had major influence on researchers, teachers, and practitioners of control in the decades that followed. The idea of designing a feedback controller such that the integral of the square of tracking error is minimized was first proposed by Wiener [17] and Hall [8], and further developed in the influential book by Newton, Gould and Kaiser [12]. However, the problem formulation in this book remained unsatisfactory from a mathematical point of view, but, more importantly, the algorithms obtained allowed application only to rather low order systems and were thus of limited value. This is not surprising since it basically took until theH2-interpretation in the 1980s of LQG control before a satisfactory formulation of least squares feedback control design was obtained. Kalman’s formulation in terms of finding the least squares control that evolves from an arbitrary initial state is a precise formulation of the optimal least squares transient control problem. The paper introduced the very important notion of c ntrollability, as the possibility of transfering any initial state to zero by a suitable control action. It includes the necessary and sufficient condition for controllability in terms of the positive definiteness of the Controllability Grammian, and the fact that the linear time-invariant system withn states,