Development of a General Purpose Motion Controller Using a Field Programmable Gate Array

Abstract

We have developed a general purpose motion controller using an FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array). The multi-PID controllers and GUI are implemented as a system-on-chip for multi-axis motion control. Comparing with the commercial motion controller LM 629, since it has multi-independent PID controllers, we have several advantages such as space effectiveness, low cost and lower power consumption. In order to test the performance of the proposed controller, motion of the robot hand is controlled. The robot hand has three fingers with 2 joints each. Finger movements show that tracking was very effective. Another experiment of balancing an inverted pendulum on a cart has been conducted to show the generality of the proposed FPGA PID controller. The controller has well maintained the balance of the pendulum.