Nonlinear receding horizon control of an RC hovercraft

This paper describes position control of an RC hovercraft. The hovercraft has two fixed thrusters, and the thrusters generate thrusts of only three discrete values, that is, forward, backward and zero. A nonlinear receding horizon control is applied to the position control of the hovercraft with the discrete-valued inputs approximated by constrained continuous-valued inputs. Although the nonlinear receding horizon control requires real-time constrained optimization, a fast algorithm was successfully implemented for the hardware experiment.