Structural properties of minimax controllers for a class of differential games arising in nonlinear H^∞ control

This paper introduces, in precise mathematical terms, two properties (named, certainty equivalence and generalized certainty equivalence) that nonlinear minimax controller problems might possess. The certainty equivalence is a generalization of the one introduced earlier by Başar and Bernhard (1991) and Bernhard (1990), which applies to problems where the 'worst-case disturbance' may not be unique (but the worst-case state trajectory is). The generalized certainty equivalance, on the other hand, extends this to accomodate nonunique worst-case state trajectories, and leads to the constrollers that guarantee a bounded upper value for the underlying game. The paper also shows that for a large class of games (and under certain conditions), certainty-equivalent (as well as generalized certainty-equivalent) controllers admit (infinite-dimensional) estimator (Kalman-filter) structures, where the estimator gain depends on the state of the estimator.