FPGA Implementation of Adaptive PID Control for Quadcopter Position Tracking

EasyChair Preprint 10894

Abstract

PID Control is a widely used approach for designing controllers in production plants, automotive and robotic applications. Though it suits linear systems, with minor modifications can also be applied for nonlinear plants as well. Being a simple control approach, it can be easily realized conceptually, but there is a large cost involved in production of the working controller. Digital PID Controller based on Fixed Point representation of the operands can be considered for approximate realization. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with its concurrent architecture, is an ideal way of producing programmable, cost, power, speed optimized controllers though with compromised controller area compared to application specific approaches. In this research, initially PID Controller for Quadcopters is tested for performance using MATLAB/Simulink based on continuous/analog domain operations. Then FPGA based architecture mapping is done using HDL Coder app, with Fixed Point based operands produced using Fixed Point Conversion app. With satisfactory performance obtained with System Generator based co-simulation of the controller, Vivado IDE is used to implement the controller on Zynq ultrascale + based FPGA device. The realized cost efficient controller is analyzed for logical resources, computation power and controller frequency and inferred to be optimal with reference to all these indices. By adapting the thrust which is the control input for the translational motion of the Quadcopter, ensures robustness against coupled motion, with higher simultaneous tracking speeds.

Keyphrases: FPGA for Digital Control, PID control, Quadcopter, adaptive control

@booklet{EasyChair:10894,
  author    = {Harish Bhat N and Shreesha Chokkadi and Satish Shenoy B.},
  title     = {FPGA Implementation of Adaptive PID Control for Quadcopter Position Tracking},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10894},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}