AXIS-IN-THE-LOOP SIMULATION: A CONCEPT TO TRANSFER VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF DISTRIBUTED INTERPOLATION ALGORITHMS FROM SIMULATION TO INTERACTION WITH COMMERCIAL MOTION CONTROL HARDWARE

摘要

Advances in manufacturing in the age of Industry 4.0 favor connected manufacturing systems and controls. Miniaturization in electronics further offers the possibility of equipping systems with individual controls. This gives us the opportunity to decrease the focus on centralized controls and distributed more responsibility on subsystems and components themselves. This changes the approach on how such a distributed system can be controlled, especially if we focus on synchronous tasks like interpolation of multiple axes. Verifying and validating such algorithms not just in simulation but also with real hardware before developing individual hardware controls for the components is key for smooth commissioning and operation. In this paper we are presenting a verification and validation architecture with a MATLAB Simulink model that controls a LinMot servo drive via a Dynamic Link Library and evaluates the performance of the setup. We also present how this concept can be extended to any controllers or manufacturers with a motion control adapter and a distributed control interface.