Evolvable Hardware Based Optimal Position Control of Quadcopter

Harish Bhat N; Shreesha Chokkadi; Satish Shenoy B.

doi:10.14429/dsj.74.18983

Harish Bhat N Centre of Excellence in Avionics and Navigation, Dept. of Aeronautical Engg., Manipal institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0726-5330
Shreesha Chokkadi Dept. of Instrumentation and Control Engg., Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education Manipal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5966-1119
Satish Shenoy B. Dept. of Aeronautical and Automobile Engg., Manipal institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education Manipal, India https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2374-3854

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14429/dsj.74.18983

Keywords: Evolvable hardware, Quadcopter position control, Dynamic partial reconfiguration, Optimal control

Abstract

Trading off performance metrics in control design for position tracking is unavoidable. This has severe
consequences in mission-critical systems such as quadcopter applications. The controller area and propulsion energy are conflicting design parameters, whereas the reliability and tracking speed are related metrics to be optimized. In this research, a switching-based position controller was co-simulated with the quadcopter model. Performance analysis of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based controller validates a better scheme for tracking speed, propulsion energy, and reliability optimization under similar error performance. To improve the computation power and controller area, the dynamic partial reconfiguration(DPR) approach has been adapted and implemented on FPGA using the Vivado Integrated Development Environment (IDE), where a ranking-based approach brings into action either proportional derivative, sliding mode, or model predictive controllers for each dimension of position tracking. It is verified by analyzing the cumulative tracking speed, reliability, controller area, and propulsion energy metrics that the proposed controller can optimize all these metrics within three successive iterations of tracking either in the same direction or in any combination of directions. Concerning the implementation results of the controller with the switching-based controller, there is 6 % computation power and 30 % resource savings due to DPR .