	Control Group

University of Cambridge > Department of Engineering > Control Group > Publications > Publication

Predictive Control Using an {FPGA} With Application to Aircraft Control

Hartley E.N. and Jerez J.L. and Suardi A. and Maciejowski J.M. and Kerrigan E.C. and Constantinides G.A.

IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2013
DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2013.2271791

Abstract

Alternative and more efficient computational methods can extend the applicability of MPC to systems with tight real-time requirements. This paper presents a ``system-on-a-chip'' MPC system, implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA), consisting of a sparse structure-exploiting primal dual interior point (PDIP) QP solver for MPC reference tracking and a fast gradient QP solver for steady-state target calculation. A parallel reduced precision iterative solver is used to accelerate the solution of the set of linear equations forming the computational bottleneck of the PDIP algorithm. A numerical study of the effect of reducing the number of iterations highlights the effectiveness of the approach. The system is demonstrated with an FPGA-in-the-loop testbench controlling a nonlinear simulation of a large airliner. This study considers many more manipulated inputs than any previous FPGA-based MPC implementation to date, yet the implementation comfortably fits into a mid-range FPGA, and the controller compares well in terms of solution quality and latency to state-of-the-art QP solvers running on a standard PC.

BibTex Entry

@Article{,: author = {Hartley E.N. and Jerez J.L. and Suardi A. and Maciejowski J.M. and Kerrigan E.C. and Constantinides G.A.},; journal = {IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology},; title = {Predictive Control Using an {FPGA} With Application to Aircraft Control},; year = {2013},; note = {DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2013.2271791}
}



© 2004 Control Group, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge www-control-admin@eng.cam.ac.uk