A Model Predictive Control Scheme with Additional Performance Index for Transient Behavior

This paper presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme for nonlinear continuous time systems where an extra performance index, which is not a measure of the distance to the set point, is introduced to influence the transient behavior of the controlled system. The scheme is based on the following fact, proven in the paper: Given a stabilizing MPC controller, adding a function, integrable in the interval [t;+1), to the stage cost does not change the asymptotic convergence property of the closed loop state trajectory. As a numerical example, this result is applied to solve a simple visual servo control problem where an MPC controller drives the state to the origin while penalizing weakly observable trajectories.