Computationally Efficient Data-Driven MPC for Agile Quadrotor Flight

Abstract: This paper develops computationally efficient data-driven model predictive control (MPC) for Agile quadrotor flight. Agile quadrotors in high-speed flights can experience high levels of aerodynamic effects. Modeling these turbulent aerodynamic effects is a cumbersome task and the resulting model may be overly complex and computationally infeasible. Combining Gaussian Process (GP) regression models with a simple dynamic model of the system has demonstrated significant improvements in control performance. However, direct integration of the GP models to the MPC pipeline poses a significant computational burden to the optimization process. Therefore, we present an approach to separate the GP models to the MPC pipeline by computing the model corrections using reference trajectory and the current state measurements prior to the online MPC optimization. This method has been validated in the Gazebo simulation environment and has demonstrated of up to $50\%$ reduction in trajectory tracking error, matching the performance of the direct GP integration method with improved computational efficiency.