Robust tube-based MPC of constrained piecewise affine systems with bounded additive disturbances

In this article, we propose a robust tube-based MPC formulation for a class of hybrid systems, namely autonomously switched PWA systems, with bounded additive disturbances. The term tube-based refers to those control techniques whose objective is to maintain all possible trajectories of the uncertain system inside a tube which is a set around the nominal (or reference) system trajectory, that is free from disturbances. Common methods in tube-based control systems consider an error dynamical system as the difference between the state of the nominal system and the state of the perturbed system. However, this definition of the error dynamical system leads to a complicated switched affine system for PWA systems. Therefore, we use a new notion of the reference system similar to the nominal system except that the switching between the various modes of the PWA system is driven by the state of the real system. Using this reference system instead of the nominal system leads us to an error dynamical system that can be modeled as a switched linear system. We employ a switched linear controller to stabilize this error system under arbitrary switching. This auxiliary controller forces the states of the uncertain system to remain in a tube confined to the invariant set around the state of the reference system. We add new constraints and tighten some other constraints of the nominal hybrid MPC for the reference system, in order to ensure convergence of the uncertain system and to guarantee robust exponential stability of the closed-loop system. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.