TinyMPC: 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 sol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 1 - 7
Main Authors Nguyen, Khai, Schoedel, Sam, Alavilli, Anoushka, Plancher, Brian, Manchester, Zachary
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 13.05.2024
Subjects
Collision avoidance
Convex functions
Hardware
Microcontrollers
Predictive control
Robots
Trajectory tracking
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DOI10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610987

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Summary: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's effectiveness by bench-marking 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 gram quadrotor, demonstrating high-speed trajectory tracking and dynamic obstacle avoidance. TinyMPC is publicly available at https://tinympc.org.
DOI:10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610987