Predictive control for spacecraft rendezvous in an elliptical orbit using an FPGA
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Abstract
A field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based predictive controller for a spacecraft rendezvous man{\oe}uvre is presented. A linear time varying prediction model is used to accommodate elliptical orbits, and a variable prediction horizon is used to facilitate finite time completion of man{\oe}uvres. The resulting constrained optimisation problems are solved using a primal dual interior point algorithm. The majority of the computational demand is in solving a set of linear equations at each iteration of this algorithm. To accelerate this operation, a custom circuit is implemented, using a combination of Mathworks HDL Coder and Xilinx System Generator for DSP, and used as a peripheral to a MicroBlaze soft core processor. The system is demonstrated in closed loop by linking the FPGA with a simulation of the plant dynamics running in Simulink on a PC, using Ethernet.