FPGA based co-design of a speed fuzzy logic controller applied to an autonomous car

This paper invests in FPGA technology to control the speed of an autonomous car using fuzzy logic. For that purpose, we propose a co-design based on a novel fuzzy controller IP. It was developed using the hardware language VHDL and driven by the Zynq processor through an SDK software design written in C. The proposed IP acts according to the ambient temperature and the presence or absence of an obstacle and its distance from the car. The partitioning of the co-design tasks divides them into hardware and software parts. The simulation results of the fuzzy IP and those of the complete co-design implementation on a Xilinx Zynq board showed the effectiveness of the proposed controller to meet the target constraints and generate suitable PWM signals. The proposed hardware architecture based on 6-LUT blocks uses 11 times fewer logic resources than other previous similar designs. Also, it can be easily updated when new constraints on the system are to be considered, which makes it suitable for many related applications. Fuzzy computing was accelerated thanks to the use of digital signal processing blocks that ensure parallel processing. Indeed, a complete execution cycle takes only 7 us.