Adrian Martin

An Architecture for Robotic Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation

Hardware-in-the-loop simulation is an increasingly popular engineering tool for its effectiveness in maintaining a balance between the two competing demands of: a) well designed and thoroughly tested systems, and b) reduced development time and costs to remain competitive. This paper proposes an architecture for applying hardware-in-the-loop simulation techniques to the design and testing of robot manipulators. Potential benefits of this architecture include allowing concurrent development of hardware and control system components and providing a reusable platform for reconfigurable manipulators through a generic and modular structure. An implementation of this architecture in the preliminary phases of development is presented here to demonstrate how these benefits can be realized

Dynamic Load Emulation in Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation of Robot Manipulators

A robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform was designed to aid in the synthesis and analysis of robot manipulators and their controllers. The platform uses a load emulation mechanism to apply nonlinear and coupled dynamic loads to the joint hardware. Some experimental results from a 5-DOF industrial manipulator are provided, demonstrating how the platform can simulate the performance of a manipulator under normal and aggressive operating conditions.

Design and Simulation of Robot Manipulators Using a Modular Hardware-in-the-loop Platform

The need for developing high quality systems with short and cost-effective design schedules has created an ongoing demand for efficient prototyping and testing tools (Wheelright & Clark, 1992). In many engineering applications failure of a system can have severe consequences, from loss of hardware and capital to complete mission failure, and can even result in the loss of human life (Ledin, 1999). The earliest form of prototyping, physical prototyping, began with the development of the first system, and it refers to fabricating a physical system to evaluate performance and test design alterations. There have been many advances in this field, such as the use of scaled models (Faithfull et al., 2001), but in most cases the time and cost involved in building complete physical prototypes are prohibitive. With the advent of computers a new form of prototyping, termed analytical prototyping, has become a second viable option (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2000). Computer models are generally inexpensive to develop and can be quickly modified to experiment with various aspects of the system. However, this flexibility often comes at the cost of approximations used to model complex physical phenomena, which in turn lead to inaccuracies in the model and system behaviour. A prototyping tool that has been gaining significant popularity in recent years is hardware-in-the-loop simulation, which can effectively combine the advantages of the two traditional prototyping methods. The underlying concept of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is to use physical hardware for system components that are difficult or impossible to model and link them to a computer model that simulates the other aspects of the system. This technique has been successfully applied to development and testing in a wide range of engineering fields, including aerospace (Leitner, 1996), automotive (Hanselman, 1996), controls (Linjama et al., 2000), manufacturing (Stoeppler et al., 2005), and naval and defence (Ballard et al., 2002). This research investigates the application of HIL simulation as a tool for the design and testing of serial-link industrial manipulators, and proposes a generic and modular robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation (RHILS) architecture. The RHILS architecture was implemented in the simulation of a standard industrial manipulator and evaluated on its ability to simulate the robot and its usefulness as a design tool. The remainder of this section briefly reviews the state-of-the-art in HIL simulation across a broad range of fields, highlighting some of the key benefits and considerations, and then summarizes the current work of other researchers in the specific field of robotic

Design and Development of Robotic Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation

This paper details the design and development of a robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform that can be used for rapid-prototyping industrial manipulators. The architecture of the proposed platform has been presented by Martin and Emami (2006). Potential benefits of such a platform include allowing concurrent development of hardware and control system components and providing a reusable platform for reconfigurable manipulators through a generic and modular structure. Some preliminary tests on the platform have also been discussed in the paper

A fault-tolerant approach to robot teams

As the applications of mobile robotics evolve it has become increasingly less practical for researchers to design custom hardware and control systems for each problem. This paper presents a new approach to control system design in order to look beyond end-of-lifecycle performance, and consider control system structure, flexibility, and extensibility. Towards these ends the Control ad libitum philosophy was proposed, stating that to make significant progress in the real-world application of mobile robot teams the control system must be structured such that teams can be formed in real-time from diverse components. The Control ad libitum philosophy was applied to the design of the HAA (Host, Avatar, Agent) architecture: a modular hierarchical framework built with provably correct distributed algorithms. A control system for mapping, exploration, and foraging was developed using the HAA architecture and evaluated in three experiments. First, the basic functionality of the HAA architecture was studied, specifically the ability to: (a) dynamically form the control system, (b) dynamically form the robot team, (c) dynamically form the processing network, and (d) handle heterogeneous teams and allocate robots between tasks based on their capabilities. Secondly, the control system was tested with different rates of software failure and was able to successfully complete its tasks even when each module was set to fail every 0.5-1.5 min. Thirdly, the control system was subjected to concurrent software and hardware failures, and was still able to complete a foraging task in a 216 m^2 environment.

Just-in-time cooperative simultaneous localization and mapping

A new technique for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is introduced. This technique was developed as a real-time, distributed, scalable implementation for heterogeneous mobile robot teams. Update efficiency and performance under variable resources is enhanced using a new strategy called Lazy Belief Propagation. The formulations and algorithms behind the implementation are described and a simulation was used to compare several SLAM algorithms. Results demonstrate an 11% improvement in map coverage in the same amount of time compared to a traditional implementation.

Analysis of robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation architecture

An architecture for robotic hardware-in-the- loop simulation (RHILS) has been proposed as a design and simulation tool for serial-link robot manipulators. This paper evaluates the RHILS platforms capabilities when applied to the simulation of the 5-d.o.f. CRS CataLyst-5 industrial manipulator from Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. The results demonstrate that the RHILS platform is able to accurately simulate the robot even under extreme operating conditions, and the platform shows significant potential as a design tool for both the robot and its control unit.

Dynamic load emulation for robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation platforms

There is a growing interest in using hardware-in-the-loop simulations for test, design, and development of robot manipulators. A major challenge, however, is how to emulate the nonlinear and coupled dynamic loads on the joint hardware modules in real time. This paper details such a load emulation mechanism, and discusses its application to an industrial robot manipulator.

A dynamically distributed control framework for robot teams

This paper discusses an implementation of a versatile architecture, labelled as HAA (Host, Avatar, Agent), using provably correct distributed algorithms. The HAA architecture lays a foundation on w ...

Just-in-time cooperative simultaneous localization and mapping : A robust particle filter approach

A new approach to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using particle filters has been developed to address the issue of limited and changing processing resources in autonomous exploration ...