Guidance and control of manned and unmanned vehicles and weapons are becoming increasingly important for all branches of the armed services. The use of unmanned ground, sea, and aerial vehicles that must guide themselves autonomously to their target is increasing. However, the guidance and control computations necessary for these vehicles and weapons are extremely complicated and require extensive processing power.

For example, a tactical air-to-air missile in pursuit of a highly maneuverable target aircraft is one of the most challenging of all guidance and control issues. The challenge presented to the missile can be divided into several parts:

• Ranging to the target
• Estimation of target motion
• Generation of guidance commands to optimally steer the missile toward target intercept
• Control of the coupled, nonlinear, multivariable & uncertain dynamics of the air-to-air missile

Altera^® FPGAs provide an ideal computational fabric for guidance and control applications. Altera’s Nios II embedded processor is a RISC microprocessor that can be used in  Stratix and Cyclone™ series devices. Altera’s DSP Builder provides simulation and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware generation in conjunction with MATLAB. Using SOPC Builder, these DSP modules, as well as other customer hardware modules, can be integrated with the Nios II processor to create dedicated hardware acceleration units that extend the control processing power of the FPGA beyond the most powerful stand-alone processors or digital signal processors available today.

Figure 1. Communications Module (SDR)

Missiles

Missiles are considered to be smart munitions. They are guided internally or externally to impact in a precise area. There are two primary ways to accomplish this, either through global positioning system (GPS) guidance, or through laser guidance. The traditional approach to missile guidance employs proportional navigation and augmented guidance algorithms. Each portion of this challenge — estimation, guidance, and control — requires intense computational power provided by an FPGA such as one from the Stratix^® II  and Stratix families.

Unmanned Aerial & Terrain Systems

Unmanned aerial and terrain vehicles and increased use of robotics will be a part of tomorrow's military. The idea is not simply to replace people with machines, but to team people with autonomous platforms. All guidance and control systems have similar complexities due to similar problems, such as uncertain terrain, noisy sensor data, and countermeasures by opposing forces. Many unmanned systems require system integration which can be easily achieved by the Stratix family of FPGAs and using cores such as the Nios^® II soft-processor. In many cases, intellectual property (IP) cores are required to further provide system integration, i.e., JPEG and MPEG cores. System integration for unmanned systems will solve the concerns with power, weight, and size.