Graphical FPGA design for a predictive controller with application to spacecraft rendezvous

A reconfigurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based predictive controller based on Nesterov's fast gradient method is designed using Simulink and converted to VHDL using Mathworks' HDL Coder. The implementation is verified by application to a spacecraft rendezvous and capture scenario, with communication between the FPGA and a simulation of the relative dynamics occuring over Ethernet. For a problem with 120 decision variables and 240 constraints, computation times of 0.95 ms are achieved with a clock rate of 50 MHz, corresponding to a speed up of more than 2000 over running the algorithm directly on a MicroBlaze microprocessor implemented on the same FPGA.