Design of a Model Predictive Trajectory Tracking Controller for Mobile Robot Based on the Event-Triggering Mechanism

A novel model predictive control- (MPC-) based trajectory tracking controller for mobile robot is proposed using the event-triggering mechanism, and the aim is to solve the problem that the MPC optimization problem requires a large amount of online computation and communication resources. This method includes two different event-triggering strategies, namely, the event-triggering based on threshold curve and the event-triggering based on threshold band. The selection of the triggering threshold is achieved by applying the statistical method to the historical data of the trajectory tracking of the mobile robot under the classic MPC method. Simulation and experimental tests illustrate that the proposed approach is able to significantly reduce the computation and communication burdens without affecting the control performance. Furthermore, the experimental results show that compared with the classic MPC-based tracking method, the proposed two event-triggering strategies can reduce 28.1% and 75.7% of the computation load and 0.886 s and 2.385 s communication time.