The impact of modeling approaches on controlling safety-critical, highly perturbed systems: the case for data-driven models

This paper evaluates the impact of three system models on the reference trajectory tracking error of the LQR optimal controller, in the challenging problem of guidance and control of the state of a system under strong perturbations and reconfiguration. We compared a smooth Linear Time Variant system learned from data (DD-LTV) with state of the art Linear Time Variant (LTV) system identification methods, showing its superiority in the task of state propagation. Moreover, we have found that DD-LTV allows for better performance in terms of trajectory tracking error than the standard solutions of a Linear Time Invariant (LTI) system model, and comparable performance to a linearized Linear Time Variant (L-LTV) system model. We tested the three approaches on the perturbed and time varying spring-mass-damper systems.