Robust observer for uncertain linear quantum systems

Abstract

In the theory of quantum dynamical filtering, one of the biggest issues is that the underlying system dynamics represented by a quantum stochastic differential equation must be known exactly in order that the corresponding filter provides an optimal performance; however, this assumption is in general unrealistic. Therefore, in this paper we consider a class of linear quantum systems subject to time-varying norm-bounded parametric uncertainty and then propose a robust observer such that the variance of the estimation error is guaranteed to be within a certain bound. Although the proposed observer is different from the optimal filter in the sense of the least mean square error, it is demonstrated in a typical quantum control problem that the observer is fairly robust against a parametric uncertainty even when the other estimators, the optimal Kalman filter and the risk-sensitive observer, fail in the estimation due to the uncertain perturbation.