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Predictive control of a Boeing 747 aircraft using an FPGA


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Hartley, EN 
Jerez, JL 
Suardi, A 
Maciejowski, JM 
Kerrigan, EC 

Abstract

New embedded predictive control applications call for more efficient ways of solving quadratic programs (QPs) in order to meet demanding real-time, power and cost requirements. A single precision QP-on-a-chip controller is proposed, implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with an iterative linear solver at its core. A novel offline scaling procedure is introduced to aid the convergence of the reduced precision solver. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experimental setup where an ML605 FPGA board controls a nonlinear model of a Boeing 747 aircraft running on a desktop PC through an Ethernet link. Simulations show that the quality of the closed-loop control and accuracy of individual solutions is competitive with a conventional double precision controller solving linear systems using a Riccati recursion.

Description

Keywords

Predictive control, Aircraft control, Model predictive control, Embedded systems, Field Programmable Gate Array, Real time control

Journal Title

IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline)

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1474-6670

Volume Title

Publisher

Elsevier BV
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/G030308/1)
This work was supported by the EPSRC (Grants EP/G031576/1, EP/G030308/1 and EP/I012036/1) and the EU FP7 Project EMBOCON, as well as industrial support from Xilinx, the Mathworks, and the European Space Agency.