Predictive control of a Boeing 747 aircraft using an FPGA

Hartley, EN and Jerez, JL and Suardi, A and Maciejowski, JM and Kerrigan, EC and Constantinides, GA (2012) Predictive control of a Boeing 747 aircraft using an FPGA. IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline), 4. pp. 80-85. ISSN 1474-6670

Abstract

New embedded predictive control applications call for more eficient 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 afield-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. © 2012 IFAC.