Development of a General Purpose PID Motion Controller Using a Field Programmable Gate Array

In this paper, we have developed a general purpose motion controller using an FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array). The multi-PID controllers on a single chip are implemented as a system-on-chip for multi-axis motion control. We also develop a PC GUI for an efficient interface control. Comparing with the commercial motion controller LM 629 it has multi-independent PID controllers so that it has several advantages such as space effectiveness, low cost and lower power consumption. In order to test the performance of the proposed controller, robot finger is controlled. The robot finger has three fingers with 2 joints each. Finger movements show that position tracking was very effective. Another experiment of balancing an inverted pendulum on a cart has been conducted to show the generality of the proposed FPGA PID controller. The controller has well maintained the balance of the pendulum.