A field programmable gate array based motion control platform

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1302951 (Table of Contents)

The expectations from motion control systems have been rising day by day. As the system becomes more complex, conventional motion control systems can not achieve to meet all the specifications with optimized results. This creates the need of re-designing the control platform in order to meet the new specifications. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) offer reconfigurable hardware, which would result in overcoming this re-designing issue. The hardware structure of the system can be reconfigured, even though the hardware is deployed. As the functionality is provided by the hardware, the performance is enhanced. The dedicated hardware also improves the power consumption. The board size also shrinks, as the discrete components can be implemented in FPGA. The shrinkage of the board size also lowers the cost. As a trade-off, FPGA programming is more complicated than software programming. The aim of this thesis is to create a level of abstraction in order to diminish the requirement of advanced hardware description language knowledge for implementing motion control algorithms on FPGA's. The hardware library is introduced which is specifically implemented for motion control purposes. In order to have a thorough motion control platform, other parts of the system like, user interface, kinematics calculations and trajectory generation, have been implemented as a software library. The control algorithms are tested, and the system is verified by experimenting on a parallel mechanism.