A Six-Gram Board Put Constrained Control at One Kilohertz

AccelMPC co-designs an alternating-direction solver, numerical representation, FPGA mapping and a custom six-gram circuit board for a 35-gram Crazyflie drone. Hardware experiments ran constrained model-predictive control at one kilohertz with dynamic obstacles and optimization problems exceeding 20,000 variables. Against embedded microcontroller solvers, the authors report up to 15.6 times faster solves and a 195.4-fold improvement in energy-delay product. The open design files support replication, but the measurements describe the team’s hardware and test conditions rather than every tiny-aircraft platform.