Square Root-Factorized Covariance Steering

Abstract: Covariance steering (CS) synthesizes a control policy which drives the state's mean and covariance matrix towards desired values. Offering tractable computation of a closed-loop policy which can obey chance constraints in uncertain environments, application to many real-world control problems have been proposed. We consider the chance-constrained, discrete-time, linear time-varying CS with Gaussian noise. The contribution of this paper is a novel solution method for this problem, explicitly writing the propagation equations of the Cholesky factor of the state covariance matrix by using the QR decomposition. The use of the square-root form of covariance matrices brings two key benefits over other existing methods: (i) computational scalability and (ii) numerical reliability. (i) Compared to solution methods that require large block matrix formulations, the proposed method scales better with the growth in horizon length, shows better optimality, and uses memoryless state feedback. (ii) Compared to another class of methods that explicitly define the covariance matrix as variables, the proposed method allows flexible cost formulations and shows better numerical reliability when uncertainty terms are smaller than the mean. On the other hand, these benefits come with a minor drawback: the propagation equation of covariance square roots is non-convex, necessitating sequential convex programming to solve. However, this paper proves the global optimality of the proposed approach for CS without chance constraints. When chance constraints are present, the existing optimal CS formulation is also non-convex, and we prove that the proposed approach shares the same local minima. We verify the mathematical arguments via extensive numerical simulations.