text: We consider a joint sensor and controller design problem for linear Gaussian stochastic systems in which a weighted sum of quadratic control cost and the amount of information acquired by the sensor is minimized. This problem formulation is motivated by situations where a control law must be designed in the presence of sensing, communication, and privacy constraints. We show that the optimal joint sensor-controller design is relatively easy when the sensing policy is restricted to be linear. Namely, an explicit form of the optimal linear sensor equation, the Kalman filter, and the certainty equivalence controller that jointly solves the problem can be efficiently found by semidefinite programming (SDP). Whether the linearity assumption in our design is restrictive or not is currently an open problem.
  @cite_18: Motivated in part by the “rational inattention” framework of information-constrained decision-making by economic agents, we have recently introduced a general model for average-cost optimal control of Markov processes subject to mutual information constraints [1]. The optimal information-constrained control problem reduces to an infinite-dimensional convex program and admits a decomposition based on the Bellman error, which is the object of study in approximate dynamic programming. In this paper, we apply our general theory to an information-constrained variant of the scalar linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control problem. We give an upper bound on the optimal steady-state value of the quadratic performance objective and present explicit constructions of controllers that achieve this bound. We show that the obvious certainty-equivalent control policy is suboptimal when the information constraints are very severe, and exhibit another policy that performs better in this low-information regime. In the two extreme cases of no information (open-loop) and perfect information, these two policies coincide with the optimum.
  @cite_1: Abstract A constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite Shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems. The resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical, while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting.
summary: Broadly, the term is used to refer to the limited ability of decision makers (human or robot) to acquire and process information. The model introduced by @cite_1 in the economics literature characterizes bounded rationality using the idea of Shannon's channel capacity. Inspired by this model, recently @cite_18 considered an information-constrained LQG control problem, which is similar to ). In this paper, we remove the somewhat restrictive assumptions made in @cite_18 , including that a controller there is a time invariant function of the current state only. Furthermore, our SDP-based approach is powerful in handling multi-dimensional systems, while @cite_18 is currently restricted to scalar systems.