A Sparse Polytopic LPV Controller for Fully-Distributed Nonlinear Optimal Control

Abstract: In this paper we deal with distributed optimal control for nonlinear dynamical systems over graph, that is large-scale systems in which the dynamics of each subsystem depends on neighboring states only. Starting from a previous work in which we designed a partially distributed solution based on a cloud, here we propose a fully-distributed algorithm. The key novelty of the approach in this paper is the design of a sparse controller to stabilize trajectories of the nonlinear system at each iteration of the distributed algorithm. The proposed controller is based on the design of a stabilizing controller for polytopic Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) systems satisfying nonconvex sparsity constraints. Thanks to a suitable choice of vertex matrices and to an iterative procedure using convex approximations of the nonconvex matrix problem, we are able to design a controller in which each agent can locally compute the feedback gains at each iteration by simply combining coefficients of some vertex matrices that can be pre-computed offline. We show the effectiveness of the strategy on simulations performed on a multi-agent formation control problem.