Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Reconcile the two definitions of (control) Hamiltonian #14

Open
hurak opened this issue Apr 3, 2025 · 0 comments
Open

Reconcile the two definitions of (control) Hamiltonian #14

hurak opened this issue Apr 3, 2025 · 0 comments

Comments

@hurak
Copy link
Owner

hurak commented Apr 3, 2025

Currently, in discrete-time part, Hamiltonian is defined as H = L + lambda f, which is quite common in control theory texts. But in the continuous-time part, it is defined as H = lambda f - L, which is perhaps a bit less common, but the motivation for its introduction was that it mimics the development of the concept in physics (recall H = p y' - L). It is perhaps disputable if this desire to show how the control theoretic concepts are related to the classical concepts in physics outweighs the notational confusion caused by using two definitions of Hamiltoninan in a single course. Perhaps it would be better to unify it so that students do not have to bother and can live with just H = L + lambda f.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant