Quadcopter control implemented on FPGA
István Zsolt Székely, Sándor Tihamér Brassai · 2019
The aim of the paper is to solve the horizontal stabilization of a quadcopter on a Field Programmable Gate Array circuit. There are similar implementations, many of them implemented on microcontroller or embedded processors. Our implementation focuses on Zybo Development Board Zynq-7000 family, which integrates a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and Xilinx 7-series FPGA logic. The essence of the work is the implementation in FPGA of the critical control loops: sensors reading, control algorithm, filters, motor control and remote control. One of the main aim of our project is to apply the implemented modules in education as well. High level control algorithm is proposed to be implemented on the embedded processor. The various subunits of the task are integrated in the Xilinx System Generator. Critical parts, the control and synchronization of the modules, are implemented in VHDL as finite state machine with datapath. Hardware co-simulation allows system parameter update and measurement evaluation during the operation and simplifies testing of implemented circuits. The paper details the measurements made under laboratory conditions for one degree of freedom of the system.