Modeling and Speed Control of a DC Motor Using an FPGA Circuit for a Small Robotic Prosthesis

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) circuits are characterized by low consumption and rapid response. For this reason, they present an attractive solution to design and control small autonomous prostheses used to recover lost mobility. These prostheses are essentially based on DC motors. In the present paper, we perform a hardware design using the HDL (Hardware Description Language) Coder Tool of Matlab and implement it on a Xilinx Spartan 3A/ 3AN FPGA board. The design includes a DC motor model and a Proportional Integrator (PI) controller that determines the speed control signal, which is generated then by the FPGA through an integrated digital-to-analog converter. The simulation and implementation results show that the hardware design allows for reaching the desired speed and generating the corresponding control and pulse width modulation (PWM) signals that supply the motor.