General value iteration based single network approach for constrained optimal controller design of partially-unknown continuous-time nonlinear systems

Abstract In this paper, a novel iterative approximate dynamic programming scheme is proposed by introducing the learning mechanism of value iteration (VI) to solve the constrained optimal control problem for CT affine nonlinear systems with utilizing only one neural network. The idea is to show the feasibility of introducing the VI learning mechanism to solve for the constrained optimal control problem from a theoretical point of view, and thus the initial admissible control can be avoided compared with most existing works based on policy iteration (PI). Meanwhile, the initial condition of the proposed VI based method can be more general than the traditional VI method which requires the initial value function to be a zero function. A general analytical method is proposed to demonstrate the convergence property. To simplify the architecture, only one critic neural network is adopted to approximate the iterative value function while implementing the proposed method. At last, two simulation examples are proposed to validate the theoretical results.