Injectivity of the Inverse Optimal Control Problem for Control-Affine Systems

Abstract

Given a control system and a set of optimal trajectories, is it possible to recover the cost for which the trajectories are minimizing? This question is called inverse optimal control problem, and the problem is said to be injective when it admits a unique solution. In this paper we present a general approach to address the issue of the cost uniqueness in the class of quadratic costs and in the case of dynamics given by a control-affine system. We then apply this method to characterize the non-uniqueness cases for a special subclass of control-affine systems.