Co-design of nonlinear control systems with bounded control inputs

This paper considers co-design of nonlinear constrained control systems: simultaneous design of the nonlinear plant and control policy where the control is bounded. Similar to prior art, the co-design is attacked as a non-convex optimization problem, which is solved by using an improved policy iteration scheme. We have proved rigorously that the system performance can be improved after each step of the proposed policy iteration scheme until convergence to a sub-optimal solution is attained. Effectiveness of the proposed methodology is illustrated through the co-design of a load-positioning system.