Dual Particle Output Feedback Control based on Lyapunov drifts for nonlinear systems

This paper presents a dual receding horizon output feedback controller for a general non linear stochastic system with imperfect information. The novelty of this controller is that stabilization is treated, inside the optimization problem, as a negative drift constraint on the control that is taken from the theory of stability of Markov chains. The dual effect is then created by maximizing information over the stabilizing controls which makes the global algorithm easier to tune than our previous algorithm. We use a particle filter for state estimation to handle nonlinearities and multimodality. The performance of this method is demonstrated on the challenging problem of terrain aided navigation.