Development of a Virtual Bench for Modeling and Research of a Mobile Robot in Simintech

Abstract

A virtual bench is designed for students studying simulation, model-oriented design of mechatronic systems and control devices. A review of existing virtual stands is performed. The training starts with simulation of a mobile robot (MR) with a single drive, for example, a transport robot moving along one coordinate, then simulation of MR with differential control moving on a plane, and then simulation of multicopters (quadcopter, hexacopter, octocopter). The virtual simulator consists of a model of MR with a single DC motor drive, MR controller, control panel. The drive model of the mobile robot in the state space is developed. Negative trends in the development of laboratory benches have been revealed: fast obsolescence of laboratory equipment; high cost; small range of equipment. Positive directions of their development have been identified: expansion of software capabilities (high-level languages) allowing to create any applications quickly and easily; appearance and improvement of special software used to create multimedia applications, as well as specialized software intended for design automation (AutoCAD, KOMPAS, Altium Designer, etc.) and mathematical calculations (Matlab, MathCAD, etc.). Software tools include SimInTech, MatLab/Simulink, LabVIEW, procedure-oriented languages VB, Delphi, Java, etc.; problem-oriented languages LISP, C++, C#, etc. In this connection, it is expedient to partially abandon traditional laboratory benches and switch to wider application of simulation modeling and computational experiment methods. Virtual laboratory benches should form the basis of such transition. As a result of simulation, the following parameters of MR model were obtained: MR displacement at 2.5 m, maximum gearbox angular speed 0.2 rad/s, maximum torque on gearbox output shaft 15 N∙m, maximum angular speed of DC motor 30 rad/s. Simulation of MR was performed in SimInTech program.