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Predictive control for spacecraft rendezvous in an elliptical orbit using an FPGA


Type

Article

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Authors

Hartley, EN 
Maciejowski, JM 

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.

Description

Keywords

Model predictive control, Predictive control, Spacecraft control, Field programmable gate array, FPGA, Embedded systems, Real time control, Time varying systems

Journal Title

2013 European Control Conference, ECC 2013

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE
Sponsorship
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Grant EP/G030308/1) as well as industrial support from Xilinx, Mathworks and the European Space Agency.