FPGA implementation of closed-loop control system for small-scale robot

Abstract

Small robots can be beneficial to important applications such as civilian search and rescue and military surveillance, but their limited resources constrain their functionality and performance. To address this, a reconfigurable technique based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) may be applied, which has the potential for greater functionality and higher performance, but with smaller volume and lower power dissipation. This project investigates an FPGA-based PID motion control system for small, self-adaptive systems. For one channel control, parallel and serial architectures for the PID control algorithm are designed and implemented. Based on these one-channel designs, four architectures for multiple-channel control are proposed and two channel-level serial (CLS) architectures are designed and implemented. Functional correctness of all the designs was verified in motor control experiments, and area, speed, and power consumption were analyzed. The tradeoffs between the different designs are discussed in terms of area, power consumption, and execution time with respect to number of channels, sampling rate, and control clock frequency. The data gathered in this paper will be leveraged in future work to dynamically adapt the robot at run time