June 2009 - PTP selected as Finalist for Graphical System Design Achievement Awards

Product Technology Partners Ltd today announced it has been selected as a finalist for the National Instruments Graphical System Design Achievement Awards. The awards, which will be presented at a ceremony during the NIWeek conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas, in August, recognize companies and universities that use graphical system design to develop innovative applications that meet complex engineering and science challenges. Dr Martin Saxon (Director, PTP) wrote the article to document his investigations into the use of LabVIEW FPGA for Servo-Hydraulic Control.

Precision servo-hydraulic control is difficult and expensive to achieve using conventional controllers. The paper describes a design study for the replacement of conventional control hardware with a custom controller based on LabVIEW™ FPGA technology. It demonstrates the substantial savings in hardware cost and software development time that can be achieved, as well as the considerable opportunity for performance enhancement through the implementation of advanced control designs.

“We needed to employ a technology that could give us the performance we required in a maintainable package and a sensible price,” explains Dr Saxon. “We required multi-channel data acquisition at 100k samples/sec synchronized with closed-loop hydraulic servo control on two axes, including safety checks, using up to 20 kHz loop rate. We required the capability to apply advanced control algorithms—non-linear multivariable adaptive and self-tuning control—as well as simple gain-scheduled PID control.” PTP’s aim is to use off-the-shelf hardware product wherever possible.“When the design was carried out, we were not aware of any other single product that could provide the same capability as the National Instruments' FPGA product we used,” says Dr Saxon. “We could have achieved the same goals using a combination of other products, but at extra cost and increased system complexity.”

Commenting on the Achievement Awards, Jeff Kodosky, cofounder and business and technology fellow at National Instruments said, “Through the use of graphical system design, innovative problem solving and hard work, the Graphical System Design Achievement Award finalists are developing applications that are meeting modern engineering challenges and changing the world. National Instruments is honored to recognize their significant contributions to science and engineering.”

National Instruments selected the 20 finalists for the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards from the submissions of 187 authors from 25 countries. The finalists are recognized in 10 categories: academic/research, aerospace/defense, automotive, biotechnology/life sciences, communications/wireless, embedded design, industrial measurements/control, mechatronics/robotics/control, production/ATE and prototype/validation test. PTP is a finalist in the Industrial Measurements and Control category.

A panel of technical experts, industry specialists, technical trade publication editors and National Instruments executives will determine the award winners in each category based on several criteria including the technical difficulty involved in developing a solution to the engineering challenge and the benefits achieved from using the application. Additionally, awards for the Humanitarian of the Year, Green Engineering Application of the Year, Multicore Application of the Year, Editor’s Choice and Overall Customer Application of the Year will be presented.