Stochastic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control with Gaussian Mixture Uncertainty Propagation

Abstract

We propose a novel Stochastic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (SNMPC) framework for nonlinear systems with additive noise. Building on recent advances in nonlinear uncertainty propagation, we show that the state distribution of the system can be tractably approximated over time by Gaussian mixture distributions, with formal error bounds in Wasserstein distance. This representation yields closed-form expressions for expected costs and chance constraints, which become exact for affine constraints and exact up to a constant for quadratic costs. Consequently, the resulting control problem can be solved efficiently via nonlinear programming, while providing formal open-loop guarantees of correctness and asymptotic optimality. Experiments on a set of benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably with existing methods in nonlinear settings with multi-modal disturbances, where standard approaches lead to poorly scaled solutions and unsafe or overly conservative control actions.