Hybrid Model Predictive Control for Stabilization of Wheeled Mobile Robots Subject to Wheel Slippage

This paper studies the problem of stabilizing wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) subject to wheel slippage to a predefined set. When slippage of the wheels can occur, WMRs can be modeled as hybrid systems. Model predictive control for such systems typically results in numerical methods of combinatorial complexity. We show that recently developed embedding techniques can be used to formulate numerical algorithms for the hybrid model predictive control (MPC) problem that have the same complexity as the MPC for smooth systems. We also discuss in detail the numerical techniques that lead to efficient and robust MPC algorithms. Examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.