On the Functional Properties of Automatically Generated Fixed-Point Controllers

The implementation of control algorithms typically starts with the development of executable models and prototype implementations, e.g. in C, running on desktop computers before being ported to the target embedded architecture. Often, this latter architecture uses fixed-point arithmetic that differs in terms of accuracy from the floating-point arithmetic used by the desktop computer. In this article, we show that our POPiX tool is capable of automatically transforming floating-point codes into fixed-point ones while preserving the functional properties of the original control algorithms and optimizing resources in terms of memory and power consumption. We experiment POPiX on two widely used algorithms: a PID controller and a Kalman filter. Our experimental results validate, at the functional level, the code generation performed automatically by POPiX.