Victoria Kostina, Assistant Professor at CalTech, has been invited for a talk titled: Information-Theoretic Tradeoffs in Control. The talk will be held March 29th at 2pm in Haas Hall, room 111. Here is more information about the talk:

Consider a flying drone controlled from the ground by an observer who communicates with it via wireless. We are interested in how well the drone can be controlled via a channel that accepts r bits/sec. Formally, the controller of a linear stochastic system aims to minimize a quadratic cost function in the state variables and control signal, known as the linear quadratic regulator (LQR). We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the communication rate r bits/sec and the limsup of the expected cost b.

We consider an information-theoretic rate-cost function, which quantifies the minimum mutual information between the channel input and output, given the past, that is compatible with a target LQR cost. We provide a lower bound to the rate-cost function, which applies as long as the system noise has a probability density function, and which holds for a general class of codes that can take full advantage of the memory of the data observed so far and that are not constrained to have any particular structure.