Embedded Controller Optimization for Efficient Electric Motor Drive

This article proposes an approach that aims to reduce the gap between control theory and its use in industrial practice, in particular in electric motor drives. We explore means to embed optimal control methods based on convex optimization directly into microcontrollers, in order to be able to recompute or update the control law regularly without the need of external intervention of an expert. This has been made possible by running a real-time scheduler on the microcontroller which can run two tasks, a fast task consisting of the motor drive control law, and a low-priority task containing the optimization solver. A simple, targeted, Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) solver has been developed for this scope. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated through a set of experimental results.