Switch-Time-Aware Hybrid Model Predictive Control Using the Hybrid Minimum Principle

Overview & Synopsis

This article presents a time-aware hybrid model predictive control (MPC) framework that simultaneously optimizes the objective with respect to both continuous control inputs and event switching times. Rather than relying on a fixed time grid, the switching instant is lifted into the decision vector and treated as an explicit optimization variable. The resulting transcription is a smooth nonlinear program whose Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions are consistent with the Hybrid Minimum Principle (HMP) event-time stationarity condition, so first-order hybrid sensitivities are recovered implicitly through the KKT system rather than by evaluating saltation matrices. Each MPC step solves a single sparse Quadratic Program (QP), jointly optimizing control inputs and impact timing in real time. On a bouncing mass landing on an oscillating platform, the method attaches in half the time of fixed-grid saltation MPC, reduces cumulative control effort by 30%, and removes the post-impact rebounds, at a 15% increase in per-cycle solve time. It matches the cumulative effort of offline time-aware solvers to within 4% while running at 2.4 ms per cycle against 281 ms for a complementarity-based formulation of the same problem, of which a 10.6x reduction is attributable to the transcription alone at a fixed solver.