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

Hartley, EN and Maciejowski, JM (2013) Predictive control for spacecraft rendezvous in an elliptical orbit using an FPGA. 2013 European Control Conference, ECC 2013. pp. 1359-1364.

Abstract

A field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based predictive controller for a spacecraft rendezvous manoeuvre 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 manoeuvres. 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. © 2013 EUCA.