Guy and Seth on Simulink

May 13th, 2010

Learning Model-Based Design using Simulink

By Guy Rouleau

I consider myself lucky to come from a school where we learned and applied Model-Based Design through projects. During my graduate studies, I had the opportunity to teach a class I took as an undergrad titled "Mechatronics Project", where the students had to control a wheeled robot. The project included:

• Planning: The students had to make a high level "interaction diagram" of the final system. In other words, they began by creating a Simulink model with empty subsystems to describe the interactions between the robot components.
• Measure the robot motion: Students could use an FPGA to process encoder pulses. As mechanical engineers, the students were very happy to avoid the complexity of FPGA programming and directly use Simulink to generate the FPGA code.
• Create a plant model: They implemented the robot’s equations of motion in Simulink and experimentally characterized important parameters, like friction.
• Control the robot motion: They implemented a PID with op-amps and resistors on a breadboard. I cannot imagine the amount of fuses we saved by designing the controller using Simulink, wiring the breadboard only once.
• Generate the trajectory: For this part, students had to program a microcontroller in C language. They could have used Simulink here too, but it would have made their life too easy!

At the end of the semester, each team had a validated working robot and an equivalent simulation.

Update

I just received a picture of the robot used in this class. Here is what it looks like:

How did you learn Simulink and Model-Based Design? What's the coolest project you have worked on? Leave a comment here to tell us about it.

By Seth Popinchalk

20:15 UTC | Posted in Code Generation, Community, Model-Based Design | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “How to Learn Model-Based Design using Simulink”

1. RAGAVENDAR replied on September 2nd, 2010 at 05:19 UTC :
   

   Hi Seth

   I am trying to design grid impact study of Wind turbine with Asynchronous generator in P.U as a ideal condition it is working fine.I want to make the model a real time one.so tried including stiffness & damping in my model which i have failed to do complete.because the output of turbine block(in distributed resources of Simpowersystems) is torque in pu & the input for shafts block(in Electric drives library of simpowersystems)are speeds in actual value
   and the input from turbine to asynchronous block is torque in PU there existing confusion in this

   I want to include Stiffness & damping of my shaft in my model,please suggest me something in this regard I am struggling to get over this one issue…

2. HuangHui replied on December 22nd, 2010 at 07:03 UTC :
   

   I want to learn model baseed design, but i an not familiar with it, i need some resourses about it.

3. Guy Rouleau replied on December 22nd, 2010 at 15:11 UTC :
   

   Hi HuangHui,

   I recommend looking at the following post by my colleague Parasar:

   http://blogs.mathworks.com/seth/2010/06/03/adopting-model-based-design/

   You will find links to a tech-kit containing many PDF files describing model-based design.

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