OPTIPLAN: A Matlab Toolbox for Model Predictive Control with Obstacle Avoidance

This paper introduces OPTIPLAN - a Matlab-based toolbox for formulating, solving, and simulating model predictive controllers (MPC) with embedded obstacle avoidance functionality. The toolbox offers a simple, yet powerful user interface that allows control researchers and practitioners to set up even complex control problems with just a few lines of code. OPTIPLAN fully automates tedious mathematical and technical details and let the user concentrate on the problem formulation. It features a rich set of tools to perform closed-loop simulations with MPC controllers and to visualize the results in an appealing way. From a theoretical point of view, OPTIPLAN tackles non-convex obstacle avoidance constraints in two ways: either by using binary variables or by resorting to suboptimal, but convex, time-varying constraints.