Discontinuous receding horizon based stabilizing feedback for nonholonomic systems in power form

In this paper, the stabilization of nonholonomic systems in power form via discontinuous pure-state feedback is addressed. The feedback is based on receding horizon principle. The stability of the resulting closed loop system is formally proved. We show in particular that, under a special choice of the prediction horizon, the formulation leads to a dead-beat controller. Otherwise, larger choices of the prediction horizon enable to minimize the amplitudes of the control actions. The power form, making possible the formulation of the strategy as a quadratic program, real-time implementation is straightforward. Simulation results are presented for a 5/sup th/ order system to illustrate the results.