Minimum-Energy Control for Stochastic Linear Systems

The open-loop minimum-energy control (MEC) problem asks for control inputs that minimize the control energy while ensuring the terminal state reaches a desired value. In this paper, we study the open-loop MEC problem for stochastic linear time-invariant systems. We consider a variety of stochastic constraints that enforce the terminal error to be small, and show that Stochastic MEC (SMEC) problem can be formulated as a QCQP. We obtain the optimal solution for SMEC and show that it generalizes the well-known Deterministic MEC problem by introducing novel stochastic variants of controllability and Gramian matrices. Finally, we show that there exists a fundamental lower bound on the optimal control energy which cannot be overcome by increasing the time horizon of the problem.