Legendre orthogonal polynomials approximation of system gramians and its application to balanced truncation

The paper presents a procedure for computation of system gramians by using Legendre orthogonal polynomials approximation of the system state impulse and output responses. The proposed approach is trajectory based and relies on the system state and output trajectories snapshots selected either by experiment or computer simulation. It is defined in deterministic settings as opposed to similar approaches defined in stochastic settings by using the data covariance matrix. The advantage of using orthogonal series approximation for the gramians is to avoid solving the usual Lyapunov equations. The proposed method can be equally well applied to linear time-invariant as well as time-varying systems, and even to unstable systems, since the gramians approximation is performed on a finite interval of time. When the observation interval contains the whole energy of the system state impulse and output responses, the proposed method gives similar results as the gramians computed by solving Lyapunov equations. Several experiments are performed showing the good approximation properties of the presented method.