The Controls and Robotics group at Clemson University implements a wide variety of simple and complex linear and nonlinear control algorithms in order to validate theoretical results. A suitable mechatronic workstation is required in order to implement the computationally intensive nonlinear controllers designed.
Until recently, only Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based boards were fast enough to implement these types of controllers in real time. A typical system consists of an IBM compatible PC with a DSP based board (such as the TMS320C30 based Spectrum Signal Processing board) installed in an ISA bus slot. Such DSP boards generally ship with DOS or UNIX based command line compilers, and a basic interface library. The Spectrum board came with SPOX, a library of C functions which could be called from DOS programs to interface to the DSP board.
DOS based solutions are not particularly user friendly in general, and are limited in functionality by the operating system itself.
A project was conceived to create a user friendly, flexible and robust environment which would be used to implement control algorithms. Desired features included implementation of complex, non-linear control algorithms, on-line tuning of control parameters, selective logging of control data, on-line graphing capability and limited processing of post control-data.
The following environments have been developed for the implementation of control algorithms in real time:
Future Work: