This paper presents two rapid control prototyping (RCP) use cases facilitated by the open-source platform UltraZohm. The openly available UltraZohm development frame-
work eases the transition from simulation to the test bench. The framework offers the integration of automatic code generation for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), either by using Simulink models based on the HDL Coder, or by synthesizing C++ code into VHDL via the Vivado high-level synthesis tool. The first use case focuses on the implementation details of an on-chip controller-in-the-loop setup, where a permanent magnetsynchronous machine is emulated in the FPGA with a sampling frequency of 2 MHz. The second use case presents an efficient real-time implemen-tation of the sphere decoding algorithm employed to solve the long-horizon finite control set model predictive control problem for a three-level neutral point clamped inverter driving an induction machine. Experimental results based on a small-scale prototype confirm that the algorithm can be executed in real time on the FPGA, with an execution time of a few tens of microseconds. Both use cases highlight the benefits of using a high-performance RCP platform for research in power electronics and their control.
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used in industrial applications for a multitude of use-cases. However, using them in control tasks is a challenge due to real-time requirements and limited resources. In this paper, an implementation scheme for real-time inference of multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks on FPGAs is proposed. Design constraints for using MLPs in reinforcement learning agents for motor control applications are derived and accounted for in the implementation. Two MLP architectures are evaluated on an FPGA, and the timing and resource-usage data are reported. The real-time capability of the implementation for motor control applications is investigated for standard control frequencies. It is shown by experimental validation that real-time interference with an area-efficient implementation for motor control applications is achievable. Therefore, the proposed implementation scheme can be applied to deep reinforcement learning controllers with hard real-time requirements.