Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers

Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers

Model-predictive control (MPC) is a powerful tool for controlling highly dynamic robotic systems subject to complex constraints. However, MPC is computationally demanding, and is often impractical to implement on small, resource-constrained robotic platforms. We present TinyMPC, a high-speed MPC solver with a low memory footprint targeting the microcontrollers common on small robots. Our approach is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and leverages the structure of the MPC problem for efficiency. We demonstrate TinyMPC both by benchmarking against the state-of-the-art solver OSQP, achieving nearly an order of magnitude speed increase, as well as through hardware experiments on a 27 g quadrotor, demonstrating high-speed trajectory tracking and dynamic obstacle avoidance.

TinyMPC is publicly available at tinympc.org.

Related Papers

2023
October
TinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers
Anoushka Alavilli, Khai Nguyen, Sam Schoedel, Brian Plancher, and Zac Manchester
arXiv (In Review)

People

Anoushka Alavilli
Anoushka Alavilli
Optimization and learning-based control
Khai Nguyen
Optimization-based planning and control
Sam Schoedel
Optimization-based planning and control
Zac Manchester
Assistant Professor
Last updated: 2023-10-26