The primary focus this project is the development of the concept of Model Predictive Control (MPC) on a chip, and finding solutions to issues related to its feasibility. In particular, topics of interest include :

• Prove the feasibility MPC for control of systems with fast dynamics.


• Determine the feasibility of MPC on a chip for various different systems.
• For given contraints, sample time, system states determine the viability of a hardware implementation.


• Apply MPC to control various examples of real systems.
• Use the theoretical work to implement a real MPC controller in hardware for the control of an Inverted Pendulum, which is a classic example of simple non-linear example.
• Extend the work to use MPC to control the 3D Crane problem.
• Implement MPC on an FPGA for the cantilevered beam problem, to compare the resulting hardware against the existing DSP solution.


• Develop the concept of MPC on a chip.
• Explore the scope for parallelisation in hardware based implementations to decrease computation time for MPC algorithm, and thus increase the complexity of systems that may feasibly be implemented.
• Develop a suite of generalised architectures and hardware modules that can be scaled to meet the requirements of a wide range of problem specifications.
• Develop proof-of-concept custom circuits to demonstrate the feasibility and benfits of deploying MPC onto FPGAs and ASICs