An Efficient Accelerator for Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The computational complexity of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) often hinders their application to cyber-physical systems with fast dynamics, such as mobile robots or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This complexity overhead comes from the control algorithm's backbone, an iterative solver that must ensure convergence and often takes the form of a highly structured convex Quadratic Program (QP). Such overhead could be overcome using specialized computer architectures. Field Programmable Gate Arrays are good candidates for making hardware accelerators that comply with the realtime constraints of fast-dynamic cyber-physical systems. Nevertheless, QP-solvers have been demonstrated to be complex to implement as a hardware accelerator. With this in mind, the present paper proposes a novel accelerator architecture that uses Knowledge-based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) as a solver while exploring its parallel nature. PSO is a stochastic global optimization algorithm that creates a fast and precise solution for NMPC. The proposed strategy in this papergrants system control stability for short sampling frequencies and long prediction horizons. It can also meet realtime constraints while achieving low hardware consumption. Additionally, it is generalized, so it can potentially be adapted to any application and is compatible with the Robot Operating System (ROS). The architecture is tested with two applications: an inverted pendulum swing-up procedure and a quadrotor drone with control and state constraints. Following, we analyze the accelerator performance and highlight our solution's advantages to other works in the literature. Namely, our architecture solves more complex problems with a greater dimension and longer horizon while using similar resources. The proposed solution also has good computational performance (29ms and 11ms) for both the quadrotor and inverted pendulum, respectively, while achieving the realtime requirements (50ms and 100ms, respectively). Parallelly, ad-hoc embedded architectures are important for a low-end, low-cost, and low-power MPSoC+FPGA device. Our solution uses less than 50% of a low-end, low-power MPSoC device (ZU3EG), while others rely on large, more power-hungry devices (e.g., Kintex7 and XC7Z045).

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 IEEE 34th International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, ASAP 2023
Pages180-187
Number of pages8
ISBN (electronic)979-8-3503-4685-5
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Conference on Application Specific Systems (ASAP), Architectures and Processors
ISSN1063-6862

Conference

Title34th IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors
Abbreviated titleASAP 2023
Conference number34
Duration19 - 21 July 2023
Website
LocationUniversity of Porto
CityPorto
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-2571-8441/work/142240574
ORCID /0000-0002-6311-3251/work/142248745
Scopus 85174829170

Keywords

Keywords

  • HW/SW co-design, Memory-based particle swarm optimization, nonlinear model predictive control, robotics