Roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing is a continuous processing technology essential for scalable production of thin-film materials and printed electronics, but precise control remains challenging due to subsystem interactions, nonlinearities, and process disturbances. This paper proposes a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control formulation for R2R systems, leveraging a GPU-based Monte-Carlo sampling approach to efficiently approximate optimal controls online. Crucially, MPPI easily handles non-differentiable cost functions, enabling the incorporation of complex performance criteria relevant to advanced manufacturing processes. A case study is presented that demonstrates that MPPI significantly improves tension regulation performance compared to conventional model predictive control (MPC), highlighting its suitability for real-time control in advanced manufacturing.
@article{arxiv.2510.06547,
title = {Model Predictive Path Integral Control for Roll-to-Roll Manufacturing},
author = {Christopher Martin and Apurva Patil and Wei Li and Takashi Tanaka and Dongmei Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.06547},
year = {2026}
}