Codesign approach to real-time high precision control

A new approach to design a high precision real-time control system for a spring forming machine is presented. This system is designed to satisfy the required high motor speed command signal and the product to product tolerance is limited to 0.1%. An innovative variable pulse generation algorithm is proposed for the activation of the motor in order to meet the stringent specifications. Because of the high speed command, software implementation of this algorithm would not be viable as this is intended to be a low cost automation system. To further enhance the system performance, an overall system architecture to incorporate a hardware solution is proposed. This new architecture comprises hardware and software functionality such that the codesign methodology is employed for the partitioning of the design procedures. Within this architecture, software development includes a user-friendly, safety and fault detection facility to improve the human-machine interface. This new precision control system meets the required performance specifications with only two-pieces of 2K gates Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Actel chips are required for the implementation.