Binary Control and Digital-to-Analog Conversion Using Composite NUV Priors and Iterative Gaussian Message Passing

The paper proposes a new method to determine a binary control signal for an analog linear system such that the state, or some output, of the system follows a given target trajectory. The method can also be used for digital-to-analog conversion. The heart of the proposed method is a new binary-enforcing NUV prior (normal with unknown variance). The resulting computations, for each planning period, amount to iterating forward-backward Gaussian message passing recursions (similar to Kalman smoothing), with a complexity (per iteration) that is linear in the planning horizon. In consequence, the proposed method is not limited to a short planning horizon.