Predictive Online Disturbance-Action Control for Linear Dynamical Systems

Abstract

This paper studies predictive online control for linear dynamical systems with time-varying cost functions, motivated by applications such as real-time adaptive control of motorized LiDAR sensing systems, where the controller must adjust the sensing direction online to balance localization accuracy, scanning efficiency, and smooth actuation under changing environmental conditions. We propose a predictive online control (POC) algorithm that leverages short-term predictions of future cost functions while accounting for the memory effect induced by system dynamics. Using the disturbance-action controller (DAC) parameterization, the online control problem is transformed into an OCO-with-memory formulation over policy parameters. We develop a windowed receding-horizon update that incorporates short-term predictions and accommodates a total-variation regularizer to suppress abrupt policy variations. Theoretically, we prove that POC achieves a dynamic policy regret bound scaling with the path length of the comparator sequence, and provide sufficient conditions in terms of logarithmic prediction and memory horizons for the regret guarantee. The proposed method is evaluated on a motorized LiDAR sensing task, demonstrating improved localization accuracy together with a favorable trade-off between sensing accuracy and scanning completeness.