Belief-prefix Control for Autonomously Dodging Switching Disturbances

This paper presents a new method of controller synthesis for hidden mode switched systems, where the disturbances are the quantities that are affected by the unobserved switches. Rather than using model discrimination techniques that rely on modifying desired control actions to achieve identification, the controller uses consistency sets which map the measured external behaviors to a belief about which mode signal is being executed and a control action. This hybrid controller is a prefix-based controller, where the prefixes come from an offline constructed belief graph that incorporates prior information about switching sequences with potential reachable sets of the dynamics. While the mode signal is hidden to the controller, the system's location on the belief graph is fully observed and allows for this problem to be transformed into a design problem in which a discrete mode, in terms of beliefs, is directly observed. Finally, it is shown that affine controllers dependent on prefixes of such beliefs can be synthesized via linear programming.