A Practical Approach to Optimal Control Problem for Atomic Clocks

Linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control is one of the known techniques used for steering atomic clocks to external references. Complexity of the use of the LQG method is caused by uncertainty in selection of the weight coefficients of the cost function. Therefore, modeling of the steering algorithm for particular noises of reference and controlled clock (oscillator) is required. In this article, we propose the algorithm, which allows us to calculate weight coefficients and, consequently, gain coefficients of the control loop without modeling, by using initial information about frequency stability of reference signal and steered oscillator. An analysis of the LQG algorithm is supplemented with the results for two other strategies for control loop gain coefficients calculation.