Title: Final-State Constrained Optimal Control via a Projection Operator Approach,
Abstract: In this paper we develop a numerical method to solve nonlinear optimal
control problems with final-state constraints. Specifically, we extend the
PRojection Operator based Netwon's method for Trajectory Optimization (PRONTO),
which was proposed by Hauser for unconstrained optimal control problems. While
in the standard method final-state constraints can be only approximately
handled by means of a terminal penalty, in this work we propose a methodology
to meet the constraints exactly. Moreover, our method guarantees recursive
feasibility of the final-state constraint. This is an appealing property
especially in realtime applications in which one would like to be able to stop
the computation even if the desired tolerance has not been reached, but still
satisfy the constraints. Following the same conceptual idea of PRONTO, the
proposed strategy is based on two main steps which (differently from the
standard scheme) preserve the feasibility of the final-state constraints: (i)
solve a quadratic approximation of the nonlinear problem to find a descent
direction, and (ii) get a (feasible) trajectory by means of a feedback law
(which turns out to be a nonlinear projection operator). To find the (feasible)
descent direction we take advantage of final-state constrained Linear Quadratic
optimal control methods, while the second step is performed by suitably
designing a constrained version of the trajectory tracking projection operator.
The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is tested on the optimal state
transfer of an inverted pendulum.