Rapid Prototyping for Control

摘要

Control applications span the entire spectrum of complexity ranging from simple on-off controllers for temperature to robust adaptive algorithms for flight control. The descriptive language for control, state space models, transfer functions and block diagrams, is common across all controllers. This suggests that the design of controllers should be based on a common scalable framework. One such framework is described in this paper. The core idea is that the use of integrated design tools allows an engineer to start with a controller design and successively experiment with the design in conjunction with the system, or perhaps a model of this system, until the performance desired has been achieved. This framework de-emphasizes separation of design and production code and strictly separated design, simulation and verification phases in the design cycles. Instead, it encourages a concurrent approach to design, simulation and verification enabling fast time to market. We describe the practical use of this framework using a multi-axis servo-controlled motion stage as an example.