Multilanguage design of a robot arm controller: Case study

This paper discusses a case study, the multilanguage design of a robot arm controller. The system is composed of two parts: the controller and the motors of the robot arm. The design starts with a multilanguage system-level specification. SDL was used for the description of the controller and Matlab was used for the description of the physical behavior of the motors. The multilanguage design flow includes the refinement of the modules and the refinement of the communication between these modules described in different languages. In order to validate the overall system through the design steps, cosimulation is performed at different levels of abstraction. This experiment shows that system level model may provide an early mock-up of the design before refining the intermodule communication