Construction of optimal feedback control for nonlinear systems via Chebyshev polynomials

A method is proposed to determine the optimal feedback control law of a class of nonlinear optimal control problems. The method is based on two steps. The first step is to determine the open-hop optimal control and trajectories, by using the quasilinearization and the state variables parametrization via Chebyshev polynomials of the first type. Therefore the nonlinear optimal control problem is replaced by a sequence of small quadratic programming problems which can easily be solved. The second step is to use the results of the last quasilinearization iteration, when an acceptable convergence error is achieved, to obtain the optimal feedback control law. To this end, the matrix Riccati equation and another n linear differential equations are solved using the Chebyshev polynomials of the first type. Moreover, the differentiation operational matrix of Chebyshev polynomials is introduced. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, the simulation results of a nonlinear optimal control problem are shown.