Unconstrained receding-horizon control of nonlinear systems

It is well known that unconstrained infinite-horizon optimal control may be used to construct a stabilizing controller for a nonlinear system. We show that similar stabilization results may be achieved using unconstrained finite horizon optimal control. The key idea is to approximate the tail of the infinite horizon cost-to-go using, as terminal cost, an appropriate control Lyapunov function. Roughly speaking, the terminal control Lyapunov function (CLF) should provide an (incremental) upper bound on the cost. In this fashion, important stability characteristics may be retained without the use of terminal constraints such as those employed by a number of other researchers. The absence of constraints allows a significant speedup in computation. Furthermore, it is shown that in order to guarantee stability, it suffices to satisfy an improvement property, thereby relaxing the requirement that truly optimal trajectories be found. We provide a complete analysis of the stability and region of attraction/operation properties of receding horizon control strategies that utilize finite horizon approximations in the proposed class. It is shown that the guaranteed region of operation contains that of the CLF controller and may be made as large as desired by increasing the optimization horizon (restricted, of course, to the infinite horizon domain). Moreover, it is easily seen that both CLF and infinite-horizon optimal control approaches are limiting cases of our receding horizon strategy. The key results are illustrated using a familiar example, the inverted pendulum, where significant improvements in guaranteed region of operation and cost are noted

A receding horizon generalization of pointwise min-norm controllers

Control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) are used in conjunction with receding horizon control to develop a new class of receding horizon control schemes. In the process, strong connections between the seemingly disparate approaches are revealed, leading to a unified picture that ties together the notions of pointwise min-norm, receding horizon, and optimal control. This framework is used to develop a CLF based receding horizon scheme, of which a special case provides an appropriate extension of Sontag's formula. The scheme is first presented as an idealized continuous-time receding horizon control law. The issue of implementation under discrete-time sampling is then discussed as a modification. These schemes are shown to possess a number of desirable theoretical and implementation properties. An example is provided, demonstrating their application to a nonlinear control problem. Finally, stronger connections to both optimal and pointwise min-norm control are proved

Nonlinear Receding-Horizon Control of Rigid Link Robot Manipulators

The approximate nonlinear receding-horizon control law is used to treat the trajectory tracking control problem of rigid link robot manipulators. The derived nonlinear predictive law uses a quadratic performance index of the predicted tracking error and the predicted control effort. A key feature of this control law is that, for their implementation, there is no need to perform an online optimization, and asymptotic tracking of smooth reference trajectories is guaranteed. It is shown that this controller achieves the positions tracking objectives via link position measurements. The stability convergence of the output tracking error to the origin is proved. To enhance the robustness of the closed loop system with respect to payload uncertainties and viscous friction, an integral action is introduced in the loop. A nonlinear observer is used to estimate velocity. Simulation results for a two-link rigid robot are performed to validate the performance of the proposed controller. Keywords: receding-horizon control, nonlinear observer, robot manipulators, integral action, robustness