The design and integration of a software configurable and parallelized coprocessor architecture for LQR control

Abstract

The increasing integration of computing into the physical systems we rely on everyday motivates the need to more easily marry advanced control theory, which is used to control these systems, with the computing platforms used to implement the controllers. This article explores one path of easing this integration using reconfigurable hardware technology, and discusses practical system-level details that must be addressed for integrating our idea into real-world systems. We present a software configurable and parallelized coprocessor architecture for LQR control that can control physical processes representable by a linear state-space model. Our proposed architecture has distinct advantages over purely software or purely hardware approaches. It differs from other hardware controllers in that it is not hardwired to control one or a small range of plant types (e.g. only electric motors). Via software, an embedded systems engineer can easily reconfigure the controller to suit a wide range of control applications that can be represented as a state-space model. One goal of our approach is to support a design methodology to help bridge the gap between controls and embedded system software engineering. Control of the well-understood inverted pendulum on a cart is used as an illustrative example of how the proposed hardware accelerator architecture supports our envisioned design methodology for helping bridge this gap. Additionally, we explore the design space of our co-processor’s parallel architecture in terms of computing speed and resource utilization. Our performance results show a 3.4 to 100 factor speedup over a 666 MHz embedded ARM processor, for plants that can be represented by 4 to 128 states, respectively. This article concludes with a discussion of the practical integration details required for interfacing the controller with a real inverted pendulum–cart system.