Feasibility study of FPGA based Real-Time controller for autonomous vehicle applications

This paper presents the use of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for the design and implementation of a UTAR Compact Real-Time Control System (UTAR CRCS) on an autonomous vehicle. The UTAR CRCS of an autonomous vehicle consists of a navigation system, vehicle control system and teleoperation system, which a single FPGA device will be used as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and digital signal processing devices. In this paper, we focus on the real-time vehicle control system. Fusion of sensors data in vehicle control system will control the low level operation of the UTAR CRCS which includes autonomous obstacle avoidance. We use Altera Quartus II and its Intellectual Property to design, simulate and verify the vehicle control system. This case study shows that FPGA offers parallel processing, good controllability and stability in signal processing thus increases flexibility of system design.