TOPCORE open modular platform for real-time control of experimental setups

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the development of a modular open source platform for experimental control setups. This platform emerged from research on the automatic rotation start-up and landing of a tethered airplane for wind energy harvesting, implementing and testing promising theoretical concepts such as real-time moving horizon estimation (MHE) and non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) on hardware developed in parallel. As experimental setups for testing new control algorithms tend to be fine-tuned by trial and error methods, a rapid control prototyping system for fast evaluation had to be implemented. Technical results of this research are presented in the form of a modular platform for real-time control.The created platform provides a complete toolchain for performing, observing and evaluating control experiments. It offers modular low-cost hardware and free software especially suited for flight control experiments. Clearly defined interfaces between the components allow for expanding on its current capabilities for other control scenarios in need of fast and reliable real-time control. The provided modularity allows for spatial separation of high performance computing hardware from low-level components, permits rapid reconfiguration of the experiment and eases the collaboration and workflow between hardware developers and control engineers.