I have a long history hobby of collecting optimization codes/programs since 1985 when I took "Numerical Algorithms" from my then MSc thesis mentor, Professor Zaikang Qi, at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), all in English!! I soon realized the difference between static optimization and dynamic optimization. Solving optimal control problems became an emerging hobby of mine. 10 years later, I moved to Singapore, and I started to use Internet (Netscape!) and in a rare chance, I knew Dr. Adam Schwartz's Ph.D. thesis work at UC Berkeley. While a full-time research engineer at National University of Singapore (NUS), I made Windows 95 version of RIOTS, originally only in Unix (Sun OS4) in 1997. It is for the first time that we can solve OCPs in Windows (Win95) without the need of compiling any code by using M-file interface. C-file interface is much faster but then a compiling process and linking process are needed.
More history of RIOTS can be found in http://mechatronics.ucmerced.edu/riots
What made me so excited? RIOTS can be used as the internal OCP solver for MPC problems as first demonstrated in 2008 in [11] and fractional order nonlinear MPC in 2014 in [14].
On 10/16/2018, embedded RIOTS+MPC now successfully running on Rasberry Pi 3 B+. A historical moment! It has been 10 years from the first 2008 paper [11]. A great teamwork of Jairo Viola and Sina Dehghan. What is next? General MPC at the Edge or simply "Edge MPC" - this will be the industrial trend! So exciting. Stay tuned and see our new series of papers.
Congratulations!
Last updated 10/25/2018
