Real-time implementation of a reference governor on the Arduino microcontroller

Abstract

This paper deals with the design of a reference governor scheme which can be implemented in real time even on very simple microcontrollers. The governor serves as a supervisory controller, which generates optimized setpoints for the inner PID controller. The task of the inner controller is to control the vertical displacement of a ball in the magnetic levitation system. The reference governor is constructed as a look-up table, which allows for a very fast and simple implementation. Experimental results are provided to illustrate that by employing reference governors, output constraints can be enforced in a systematic manner. The results also confirm real-time implementability of such strategies on Arduino microcontrollers with modest resources.