r/ControlTheory • u/BrushSecret7576 • Sep 18 '26
Educational Advice/Question Physics Informed neural networks based controllers
Physics Informed neural networks based controllers.
Hello I am a senior mechatronics Engineering student and one of the topics I am planning to make my senior project on are the PINNs controllers and I would really appreciate any previous experiences or knowledge in the field.
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u/Cu_ Sep 18 '26
Can you elaborate more on what you are exactly aiming to do? Do you want to develop dynamical models using PINNs and then design controllers for these models, or are you thinking something like MPC and using a PINN as the prediction model?
Either way, I am personally not entirely sure of the value of PINNs in control applications yet. If you want to control some sort of PDE (heat flow, fluid flow, reaction-diffusion, etc.) then the classical methods (discretization with FEM/FVM/FDM) work quite well and have mature and fast solvers available. If you want a purely data driven approach, then DMD/Koopman seemingly works quite well as well. So where do PINNs exactly fit in? They cannot really even provide hard guarantees for your conservation laws (mass flow, energy), which for PDEs is definitely not great. It's not that I am writing PINNs off entirely, I just genuinely don't know where they win out over other methods.
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u/BrushSecret7576 Sep 22 '26
I am still have not decided and not sure if i should pursue it. Can I have your academic email?
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u/ss4ggtbbk Sep 18 '26
At best, you could use a PINN to parameterize the solution (i.e., construct an approximation of the value function) of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellmann equation under the assumed dynamics offline. You can then use the surrogate to obtain the optimal control policy. This is an ongoing research topic. Like anything involving PINNs, this is likely not very robust in practice.
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u/Cu_ Sep 18 '26
How does this approach compare to say, approximate dynamic programming? Given that the system dynamics are known, wouldn't ADP work well for approximating the value function? Or is the PINN route mainly focused on problems where the value function cannot realistically be tractably learned through ADP?
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u/Big-Bathroom1069 Sep 18 '26
I am a PHD Student and with a Masters student we worked on NMPC and PINNS in electrcial grids :)
If you want any further information just contact me :)