Design and circuit implementation of approximate switched MPC

This paper proposes a novel method for design and circuit implementation of approximate controllers for constrained hybrid or piecewise affine (PWA) systems, through switched model predictive control technique. The PWA solution (discontinuous, in general) provided by this method is approximated by another PWA function composed of continuous patches defined over regular simplices. Two circuit architectures for the implementation of this approximate controller are proposed, which allow achieving reduced complexity and shorter latency, with respect to the circuits implementing the exact controller. This makes it possible the control of systems with smaller sampling times. The performances of the approximate controller are shown through hardware-in-the-loop testings of the closed-loop system.