Riccati Recursion for Optimal Control Problems of Nonlinear Switched Systems

We propose an efficient algorithm for the optimal control problems (OCPs) of nonlinear switched systems that optimizes the control input and switching instants simultaneously for a given switching sequence. We consider the switching instants as the optimization variables and formulate the OCP based on the direct multiple shooting method. We derive a linear equation to be solved in Newton's method and propose a Riccati recursion algorithm to solve the linear equation efficiently. The computational time of the proposed method scales linearly with respect to the number of time stages of the horizon as the standard Riccati recursion. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method converges with a significantly shorter computational time than the conventional methods. Copyright (C) 2021 The Authors.