To promote the widespread use of mobile robots in diverse fields, the performance of trajectory tracking must be ensured. To address the constraints and nonlinear features associated with mobile robot systems, we apply nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) to realize the trajectory tracking of mobile robots. Specifically, to alleviate the online computational complexity of nonlinear MPC, this paper devises a lattice piecewise affine (PWA) approximation method that can approximate both the nonlinear system and control law of explicit nonlinear MPC. The kinematic model of the mobile robot is successively linearized along the trajectory to obtain a linear time-varying description of the system, which is then expressed using a lattice PWA model. Subsequently, the nonlinear MPC problem can be transformed into a series of linear MPC problems. Furthermore, to reduce the complexity of online calculation of multiple linear MPC problems, we approximate the optimal solution of the linear MPC by using the lattice PWA model. That is, for different sampling states, the optimal control inputs are obtained, and lattice PWA approximations are constructed for the state control pairs. Simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of our method in comparison with the linear MPC and explicit linear MPC frameworks. The results show that compared with the explicit linear MPC, our method has a higher online computing speed and can decrease the offline computing time without significantly increasing the tracking error.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of passivity and feedback passification of smooth discrete-time nonlinear systems by considering their piecewise affine approximations. Sufficient conditions are derived for passivity and feedback passivity. These results are then extended to systems that operate over Gilbert-Elliott type communication channels. As a special case, results for feedback passivity of piecewise affine systems over a lossy channel are also derived.
EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new exploration and manipulation capabilities and safe human-robot interactions. However, the interactions, or perturbations by external forces cause the soft structure to deform in an infinite degree of freedom (DOF) space. To control such system, reduced order models are needed; typically models consider piecewise sections of constant curvature although externa…
This paper presents an efficient, offline method to simultaneously synthesize controllers and seek closed-loop Lyapunov functions for constrained piecewise affine systems on triangulated subsets of the admissible states. Triangulation refinements explore a rich class of controllers and Lyapunov functions. Since an explicit Lipschitz Lyapunov function is found, an invariant subset of the closed-loop region of attraction is obtained. Moreover, it is a control Lyapunov function, so minimum-norm controllers can be realized through online quadratic programming. It is formulated as a sequence of sem…
Piecewise affine (PWA) systems are widely applied in many practical cases such as the control of nonlinear systems and hybrid dynamics. However, most of the existing PWA control methods have poor scalability with respect to the number of modes and system dimensions and may not be robust to the disturbances in performance. In this paper, we present a robust approximate simulation based control method for PWA systems under bounded external disturbances. First, a lower-dimensional linear system (abstraction) and an associated interface are designed to enable the output of the PWA system (concrete…
State Estimation for Piecewise Affine State-Space Models
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Tampere University of Technology (TUT)（坦佩雷理工大学）
We propose two optimization-based heuristics for structure selection and identification of PieceWise Affine (PWA) models with exogenous inputs. The first method determines the number of affine sub-models assuming known model order of the sub-models, while the second approach estimates the model order for a given number of affine sub-models. Both approaches rely on the use of regularization-based shrinking strategies, that are exploited within a coordinate-descent algorithm. This allows us to estimate the structure of the PWA models along with its model parameters. Starting from an over-paramet…
On the complexity of bounded time and precision reachability for piecewise affine systems
ENS Cachan/Bretagne et Université Rennes 1（巴黎高等师范学校卡尚分校/布列塔尼与雷恩第一大学）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Egypt Japan University of Science and Technology（埃及日本科学技术大学）；Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University（亚历山大大学工程学院）
In this paper, we investigate the model reference adaptive control approach for uncertain piecewise affine systems with performance guarantees. The proposed approach ensures the error metric, defined as the weighted Euclidean norm of the state tracking error, to be confined within a user-defined time-varying performance bound. We introduce an auxiliary performance function to construct a barrier Lyapunov function. This auxiliary performance signal is reset at each switching instant, which prevents the transgression of the barriers caused by the jumps of the error metric at switching instants. …
The fundamental problem of stabilizing a general nonaffine continuous-time nonlinear system is investigated via piecewise affine linear models (PALMs) in this article. A novel integral sliding-mode parallel control (ISMPC) approach is developed, where an uncertain piecewise affine system (PWA) is constructed to model a nonaffine continuous-time nonlinear system equivalently on a compact region containing the origin. A piecewise sliding-mode parallel controller is designed to globally stabilize the PALM and, consequently, to semiglobally stabilize the original nonlinear system. The proposed sch…
In this paper, we present a novel approach to decompose a given piecewise affine (PWA) function into two convex PWA functions. Convex decompositions are useful to speed up or distribute evaluations of PWA functions. Different approaches to construct a convex decomposition have already been published. However, either the two resulting convex functions have very high or very different complexities, which is often undesirable, or the decomposition procedure is inapplicable even for simple cases. Our novel methodology significantly reduces these drawbacks in order to extend the applicability of co…
In this manuscript, we investigate symbolic abstractions that capture the behavior of piecewise-affine systems under input constraints and bounded external noise. This is accomplished by considering local affine feedback controllers that are jointly designed with the symbolic model, which ensures that an alternating simulation relation between the system and the abstraction holds. The resulting symbolic system is called a state-feedback abstraction and we show that it can be deterministic even when the original piecewise-affine system is unstable and non-deterministic. One benefit of this appr…
The action governor is an add-on scheme to a nominal control loop that monitors and adjusts the control actions to enforce safety specifications expressed as pointwise-in-time state and control constraints. In this paper, we introduce the Robust Action Governor (RAG) for systems the dynamics of which can be represented using discrete-time Piecewise Affine (PWA) models with both parametric and additive uncertainties and subject to non-convex constraints. We develop the theoretical properties and computational approaches for the RAG. After that, we introduce the use of the RAG for realizing safe…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
In this paper, the disjunctive and conjunctive lattice piecewise affine (PWA) approximations of explicit linear model predictive control (MPC) are proposed. The training data are generated uniformly in the domain of interest, consisting of the state samples and corresponding affine control laws, based on which the lattice PWA approximations are constructed. Re-sampling of data is also proposed to guarantee that the lattice PWA approximations are identical to explicit MPC control law in the unique order (UO) regions containing the sample points as interior points. Additionally, under mild assum…
