Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

This paper focuses on motion control problems of an omnidirectional robot based on the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method. Although NMPC has been studied in many mobile robots applications due to the advantages of taking the robot constraints into account and increasing the robot performance with future information, the high computational requirement makes NMPC difficult to be utilized in the real systems with fast sampling time. In order to reduce the computational effort, many works either eliminate the computations which are necessary to keep the control stability, or linearize the nonlinear models only with local stability. Lots of research only presents the simulation results with NMPC. The main contributions of this paper are not only to analyze and design NMPC controllers with guaranteed stability to nonlinear kinematic models, but also to show the feasibility of NMPC with a real fast moving omnidirectional robot.