Optimal Covariance Control for Stochastic Systems Under Chance Constraints

Abstract: This work addresses the optimal covariance control problem for stochastic discrete-time linear time-varying systems subject to chance constraints. Covariance steering is a stochastic control problem to steer the system state Gaussian distribution to another Gaussian distribution while minimizing a cost function. To the best of our knowledge, covariance steering problems have never been discussed with probabilistic chance constraints although it is a natural extension. In this work, first we show that, unlike the case with no chance constraints, the covariance steering with chance constraints problem cannot decouple the mean and covariance steering sub-problems. Then we propose an approach to solve the covariance steering with chance constraints problem by converting it to a semidefinite programming problem. The proposed algorithm is verified using two simple numerical simulations.