Multi-Rate Planning and Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems: Model Predictive Control and Control Lyapunov Functions

Understand

Modern control systems must operate in increasingly complex environments subject to safety constraints and input limits, and are often implemented in a hierarchical fashion with different controllers running at multiple time scales.

• Yet traditional constructive methods for nonlinear controller synthesis typically "flatten" this hierarchy, focusing on a single time scale, and thereby limited the ability to make rigorous guarantees on constraint satisfaction that hold for the entire system.
• In this work we seek to address the stabilization of constrained nonlinear systems through a \textit{multi-rate} control architecture.
• This is accomplished by iteratively planning continuous reference trajectories for a nonlinear system using a linearized model and Model Predictive Control (MPC), and tracking said trajectories using the full-order nonlinear model and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs).