Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Engineering - Department of Electronics and Communication

In this work, a novel strategy for a flexible FPGA implementation of autopilot is presented. The implementation improves the reliability by allowing redundant calculations. This is achieved through very high processing speed. The power is reduced due to minimization of hardware by employing time-sharing of resources. Control is made flexible by allowing the hardware to be driven through instructions provided externally by the user. As a case study, an autopilot for space application was chosen. This application needs a high grade of reliability and also flexibility. The proposed FPGA design is firstly implemented in a high level of abstraction, using the VHDL language. Then a hardware implementation using FPGA (XILINX SPARTAN 3AN) is performed. A useful comparison between the CPU-based approach for autopilot and the proposed FPGA is performed using real data acquired through hardware in the loop (HIL) experiment

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