Model-predictive control (MPC) is a powerful tool for controlling highly dynamic robotic systems subject to complex constraints. However, MPC is computationally demanding, and is often impractical to implement on small, resource-constrained robotic platforms. We present TinyMPC, a high-speed MPC solver with a low memory footprint targeting the microcontrollers common on small robots. Our approach is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and leverages the structure of the MPC problem for efficiency. We demonstrate TinyMPC's effectiveness by benchmarking against the state-of-the-art solver OSQP, achieving nearly an order of magnitude speed increase, as well as through hardware experiments on a 27 gram quadrotor, demonstrating high-speed trajectory tracking and dynamic obstacle avoidance. TinyMPC is publicly available at https://tinympc.org.
@article{arxiv.2310.16985,
title = {TinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers},
author = {Anoushka Alavilli and Khai Nguyen and Sam Schoedel and Brian Plancher and Zachary Manchester},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.16985},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted at ICRA 2024. First three authors contributed equally and are listed in alphabetical order. Publicly available at https://tinympc.org