A robotic vehicle testbench for the application of MBD-MDE development technologies

Models are used in control domains for early validation of system properties, using simulation or formal verification, and for the automatic generation of a software implementation. We propose an approach in which a functional model of the controls is matched to a model of the execution platform through an intermediate mapping model, that represents the software tasks and communication messages. The functional model is (partly) developed in Simulink and code is generated for each subsystem. Next, an abstract view of the functional model is imported in SysML. Using SysML, a model of the execution platform is created, and an implementation of the subsystems as a set of tasks and messages is defined and evaluated. The M2T Acceleo tool processes the mapping model and generates the Orocos-compliant task code executing the C/C++ functions generated from Simulink, and the inter-task communication. This paper outlines the proposed flow and provides the description of a robotic car testbench used to show the application of the methodology. The testbench has enough functional complexity and a distributed implementation to justify the creation of architecture models, while requiring a moderate cost and effort for its construction by the interested researchers.