Integration of structural simulations into a real-time capable Overall System Simulation for complex mechatronic systems

Abstract

To meet the rising demand of performing complex tasks in a highly technologized world, the development of mechatronic systems faces two major challenges: First, the system is integrated in a fast changing environment and has to cope with dynamically modified tasks and circumstances. At the same time, the development of new methods has to be fast, cost-effective and efficient. By taking care of both aspects simultaneously, simulations have become an acknowledged tool to cost-effectively and rapidly test and optimize new solutions for complex mechatronic systems, as they are common in, e.g., robotics. Mostly, simulation methods are specialized for one purpose and thus used as a stand-alone tool to analyze the behavior of single components or certain aspects of the whole system. But with size and complexity of the system, the susceptibility to errors rises when the interaction between components fails. If a component shows minimal deviations to its nominal behavior, huge interdependencies between components of complex systems might cause system failure. The structural behavior of a single component is therefore as crucial to the functionality of the whole system as the interplay of all components. Both aspects have to be analyzed in parallel, which is nowadays barely considered. Consequently, this work presents the integration of structural simulations into the overall picture. The developed approach consists of a concept, an implementation and the validation for an automated bidirectional interaction to integrate results from Finite Element Analysis (FEA) into an existing, real-time capable Overall System Simulation for mechatronic systems in general and robotics in particular.