FPGA implementation of marginalized particle filter for sensorless control of PMSM drives

Marginalized particle filter is a stochastic filter combining Kalman filters with particle filters. It decomposes the model into linear and nonlinear part and applies the Kalman filter for the former and the particle filter for the latter. In effect, this allows to represent accurately the inherent non-Gaussianity and nonlinearity of the model. This allows estimation of the rotor position of the PMSM drive in the full speed range, including the standstill. The main disadvantage is its high computational cost. In this paper, we present an implementation of the marginalized particle filter in the field programmable logic array (FPGA). The parallel nature of the MPF algorithm allows to use pipelining which yields speedup in the order of magnitude in comparison to the DSP implementation. The sensorless control of the drive is implemented on a board with both DSP and FPGA, where the drive control runs on the DSP and the MPF estimator in the FPGA. Execution time of the estimator is thus negligible in the execution time of the sensorless control. Performance of the resulting sensorless control algorithm is evaluated on a developed drive prototype of rated power of 10.7kW.