A Dynamic-Growing Fuzzy-Neuro Controller, Application to a 3PSP Parallel Robot

Accurate dynamics models are critical for the design of predictive controllers for autonomous mobile robots. Physics-based models are often too simple to capture relevant real-world effects, while data-driven models are data-intensive and slow to train. We introduce an approach for fast adaptation of neural robot dynamic models that combines offline training with efficient online updates. Our approach learns an incremental neural dynamics model offline and performs low-rank second-order parameter adaptation online, enabling rapid updates without full retraining. We demonstrate the approach on a real quadrotor robot, achieving robust predictive tracking control in novel operational conditions.

We address the problem of improving the performance of pre-stabilized networked systems subject to plug-and-play (PnP) operations, namely additions or removals of subsystems. While distributed baseline controllers can preserve stability after a PnP transition, augmenting them with expressive neural policies can invalidate the formal stability guarantees. To overcome this issue, we build on recently proposed Performance Boosting controllers based on the Internal Model Control (IMC) principle, which reduce closed-loop stability to a finite $\ell_2$-gain requirement on an auxiliary operator. In the distributed setting, this operator is formed by interconnecting local neural operators that exchange information only between neighboring subsystems. We then derive free parametrizations of this interconnection, namely explicit maps from unconstrained trainable variables to interconnected neural operators satisfying a prescribed network gain bound for every parameter value. The obtained distributed neural controller can therefore be trained by unconstrained gradient-based optimization without stability constraints or projection steps, while retaining the prescribed gain bound at every training iterate. We develop two complementary parametrizations. A neighbor-based compositional parametrization uses local coupling bounds, so that after a PnP event only subsystems whose bounds change need to update their gain parameters. A network-norm parametrization instead uses a bound on the overall coupling matrix and can reduce conservatism, at the price of requiring network-wide information. A PnP DC-microgrid case study shows that the proposed neural layer improves voltage transients under topology changes and load variations while preserving nominal closed-loop stability.

The control of high-dimensional systems, such as soft robots, requires models that faithfully capture complex dynamics while remaining computationally tractable. This work presents a framework that integrates Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based dynamics models with structure-exploiting Model Predictive Control to enable real-time control of high-dimensional systems. By representing the system as a graph with localized interactions, the GNN preserves sparsity, while a tailored condensing algorithm eliminates state variables from the control problem, ensuring efficient computation. The complexity of our condensing algorithm scales linearly with the number of system nodes, and leverages Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallelization to achieve real-time performance. The proposed approach is validated in simulation and experimentally on a physical soft robotic trunk. Results show that our method scales to systems with up to 1,000 nodes at 100 Hz in closed-loop, and demonstrates real-time reference tracking on hardware with sub-centimeter accuracy, outperforming baselines by 63.6%. Finally, we show the capability of our method to achieve effective full-body obstacle avoidance.