Distributed receding horizon control of coupled nonlinear oscillators: Theory and application

This paper extends recent results on distributed receding horizon control (RHC) of dynamically coupled nonlinear systems subject to decoupled input constraints. Motivating examples of such systems include chains of coupled oscillators and supply chain management systems. Conditions for feasibility and stability of the distributed RHC algorithm are stated, with substantially less conservative requirements then previously derived. The conditions are shown to be satisfied for a set of coupled Van der Pol oscillators that model a walking robot experiment. Numerical experiments show good performance and demonstrate the computational savings over centralized RHC.