Structure-Exploiting Newton-Type Method for Optimal Control of Switched Systems

This study proposes an efficient Newton-type method for the optimal control of switched systems under a given mode sequence. A mesh-refinement-based approach is utilized to discretize continuous-time optimal control problems (OCPs) using the direct multiple-shooting method to formulate a nonlinear program (NLP), which guarantees the local convergence of a Newton-type method. A dedicated structure-exploiting algorithm (Riccati recursion) is proposed that efficiently performs a Newton-type method for the NLP because its sparsity structure is different from a standard OCP. The proposed method computes each Newton step with linear time-complexity for the total number of discretization grids as the standard Riccati recursion algorithm. Additionally, it can always solve the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) systems arising in the Newton-type method if the solution is sufficiently close to a local minimum. Conversely, general quadratic programming (QP) solvers cannot accomplish this because the Hessian matrix is inherently indefinite. Moreover, a modification on the reduced Hessian matrix is proposed using the nature of the Riccati recursion algorithm as the dynamic programming for a QP subproblem to enhance the convergence. A numerical comparison is conducted with off-the-shelf NLP solvers, which demonstrates that the proposed method is up to two orders of magnitude faster. Whole-body optimal control of quadrupedal gaits is also demonstrated and shows that the proposed method can achieve the whole-body model predictive control (MPC) of robotic systems with rigid contacts.