Digital Implementation via FPGA of Controllers for Active Control of Ground Vehicles

This work studies the implementation issues of a discrete-time super-twisting controller on an FPGA. It is shown how it is possible to enhance this implementation using a pipelining technique. The controller is designed on the basis of a discrete-time vehicle model, recently presented. The super- twisting algorithm ensures some robustness properties in the presence of unknown bounded perturbations. It is shown that the pipelined implementation of the super-twisting controller on an FPGA allows lower execution times, and hence smaller sampling times, than its naive implementation. Therefore, the pipelining technique allows implementing more sophisticated controllers for vehicle control. Moreover, it is shown that the power consumption of the pipelined control algorithm results lower than a conventional one, which is an important aspect for on-board automobile systems. Since the pipelined implementation of the controller requires shorter times, even if the controller performance is similar to that of the no-pipelined one, the use of pipelining techniques allows considering cheaper FPGAs with less performance. Such results show that the FPGA technology, along with methodological solutions for optimal controller implementation, represents an appealing alternative to ECUs.