Online Constraint Tightening in Stochastic Model Predictive Control: A Regression Approach
This addresses a key bottleneck in stochastic model predictive control for applications like robotics or autonomous systems, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of setting constraint-tightening parameters in chance-constrained stochastic optimal control by proposing an online data-driven approach that learns these parameters via binary regression, resulting in lower average costs than three state-of-the-art methods in numerical experiments.
Solving chance-constrained stochastic optimal control problems is a significant challenge in control. This is because no analytical solutions exist for up to a handful of special cases. A common and computationally efficient approach for tackling chance-constrained stochastic optimal control problems consists of reformulating the chance constraints as hard constraints with a constraint-tightening parameter. However, in such approaches, the choice of constraint-tightening parameter remains challenging, and guarantees can mostly be obtained assuming that the process noise distribution is known a priori. Moreover, the chance constraints are often not tightly satisfied, leading to unnecessarily high costs. This work proposes a data-driven approach for learning the constraint-tightening parameters online during control. To this end, we reformulate the choice of constraint-tightening parameter for the closed-loop as a binary regression problem. We then leverage a highly expressive \gls{gp} model for binary regression to approximate the smallest constraint-tightening parameters that satisfy the chance constraints. By tuning the algorithm parameters appropriately, we show that the resulting constraint-tightening parameters satisfy the chance constraints up to an arbitrarily small margin with high probability. Our approach yields constraint-tightening parameters that tightly satisfy the chance constraints in numerical experiments, resulting in a lower average cost than three other state-of-the-art approaches.