FPGA implementation of an interior point method for high-speed model predictive control

Abstract

In this paper, we present a hardware architecture for implementing an interior point method for model predictive control (MPC) on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The FPGA implementation allows the solution of quadratic programs occurring in MPC at very high speed. Experiments show that our hardware implementation is able to outperform an software implementation running on a high-end CPU while consuming significantly less power making it well-suited for embedded industrial control applications. In contrast to existing FPGA implementations, the proposed solution exploits the MPC-specific problem structure with the direct linear equation solver and uses an efficient predictor-corrector algorithm. Moreover, the modular design of the architecture simplifies customization or extension to special control problem classes. The proposed FPGA solution can broaden the applicability of solving complex or large MPC problems in embedded computing platforms that were so far considered out of reach.