Recent decades have witnessed the phenomenal success of model predictive control (MPC) in a wide spectrum of domains, such as process industries, intelligent transportation, automotive applications, power systems, cyber security, and robotics. For constrained dynamic systems subject to uncertainties, robust MPC is attractive due to its capability of effectively dealing with various types of uncertainties while ensuring optimal performance concerning prescribed performance indices. But most robust MPC schemes require prior knowledge on the uncertainty, which may not be satisfied in practical applications. Therefore, it is desired to design robust MPC algorithms that proactively update the uncertainty description based on the history of inputs and measurements, motivating the development of adaptive MPC. This dissertation investigates four problems in robust and adaptive MPC from theoretical and application points of view. New algorithms are developed to address these issues efficiently with theoretical guarantees of closed-loop performance.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of robust MPC, adaptive MPC, and self-triggered MPC, where the recent advances in these fields are reviewed. Chapter 2 presents notations and preliminary results that are used in this dissertation. Chapter 3 investigates adaptive MPC for a class of constrained linear systems with unknown model parameters. Based on the recursive least-squares (RLS) technique, we design an online set-membership system identification scheme to estimate unknown parameters. Then a novel integration of the proposed estimator and homothetic tube MPC is developed to improve closed-loop performance and reduce conservatism.

In Chapter 4, a self-triggered adaptive MPC method is proposed for constrained discrete-time nonlinear systems subject to parametric uncertainties and additive disturbances. Based on the zonotope-based reachable set computation, a set-membership parameter estimator is developed to refine a set-valued description of the time-varying parametric uncertainty under the self-triggered scheduling. We leverage this estimation scheme to design a novel self-triggered adaptive MPC approach for uncertain nonlinear systems. The resultant adaptive MPC method can reduce the average sampling frequency further while preserving comparable closed-loop performance compared with the periodic adaptive MPC method.

Chapter 5 proposes a robust nonlinear MPC scheme for the visual servoing of quadrotors subject to external disturbances. By using the virtual camera approach, an image-based visual servoing (IBVS) system model is established with decoupled image kinematics and quadrotor dynamics. A robust MPC scheme is developed to maintain the visual target stay within the field of view of the camera, where the tightened state constraints are constructed based on the Lipschitz condition to tackle external disturbances.

In Chapter 6, an adaptive MPC scheme is proposed for the trajectory tracking of perturbed autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) subject to input constraints. We develop an RLS-based set-membership based parameter to improve the prediction accuracy. In the proposed adaptive MPC scheme, a robustness constraint is designed to handle parametric and additive uncertainties. The proposed constraint has the offline computed shape and online updated shrinkage rate, leading to further reduced conservatism and slightly increased computational complexity compared with the robust MPC methods.

Chapter 7 shows some conclusion remarks and future research directions.