Nonlinear MPC Without Terminal Costs or Constraints for Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicles

This letter proposes a novel NMPC for multi-rotor aerial vehicles which is designed without stabilizing terminal costs or constraints in its cost function for stabilization. A growth bound sequence is derived from a tailored running cost to ensure the closed-loop stability and provide a measure of the performance of the proposed NMPC scheme. Furthermore, it facilitates the computation of a stabilizing prediction horizon that guarantees the asymptotic stability of the system. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated through two sets of numerical simulations and compared against the traditional NMPC scheme for the application as proposed in (Kamel et al., 2017). The results show superior performance of the proposed NMPC scheme in terms of tracking accuracy, convergence rate, and computation time.