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Vol: 53(67) No: 2 / June 2008        

Simulation of Real-Time Distributed Networked Control of Rotational Quanser Experiments using TrueTime and Matlab
Cosmin Ionete
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania, e-mail: cosmin@automation.ucv.ro
Dan Selisteanu
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania
Dorin Sendrescu
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania
Dorin Popescu
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania
Monica Roman
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania
Dragos Surlea
Department of Automatic Control, University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, A.I.Cuza Street, No. 13, 200585, Craiova, Romania


Keywords: networked control, distributed control, robust control, real-time simulation

Abstract
The real-time implementation of a control law is sometimes a difficult task because of the real-time environment that was not taken into account. The design of the control law is the control engineer task and his real time implementation is the job of the software engineer. The TrueTime MATLAB/Simulink real-time extension gives the possibility to a system engineer to deal with both design and real time implementation of the control law. TrueTime is a MATLAB/Simulink-based tool for simulation of real time distributed control systems. We shall emphasize the differences between the classical simulation and simulation of a real-time network distributed control. In this article we present a complex case of a control system: two Quanser experiments (flexible beam and inverted pendulum) and two real-time robust controllers with a distributed network control architecture. Using simulation results we can choose between the scheduling strategies in order to select the best one. We can also simulate the network congestion, package lost and computational time influence into the overall control system performances. This is the first and necessary step in implementing embedded systems.

References
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