Robust-to-Early Termination Model Predictive Control

Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular control approach to ensure constraint satisfaction, while minimizing a cost function. Although MPC usually leads to very good results in terms of performance, its computational overhead is typically nonnegligible, and its implementation for systems where the computing capacity is limited may be impossible. To address this issue, this technical note proposes a robust-to-early termination MPC. That is, the proposed scheme runs until available time for execution runs out, and the solution, while suboptimal, is guaranteed to enforce the constraints and ensure recursive feasibility despite arbitrary early termination. Also, the closed-loop stability is maintained. Simulations are carried out on an F-16 aircraft to assess the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.