Rapid Prototyping of Mechatronic Systems with Mixed Continuous and Discrete-Event Dynamics

This paper presents rapid prototyping approach for control devices in mechatronics with special attention paid to the unified description and interaction of continuous and discrete-event processes. Traditionally, different dynamics of continuous processes one hand, and logical discrete event processes on the other hand, requires a different theoretical approaches for the description of both kind of processes. However, a complete functionality of the mechatronic system is achieved by settling interaction between both kinds of processes. In this paper, the idea of well known state space description of continuous systems is widened to the field of event driven systems, which results in a unified recursive modeling approach for both kinds of processes. The interaction between the continuous and event-driven processes is introduced by converting continuous values into the logical conditions on one side, and by converting discrete logic states into the appropriate continuous reference values on the other side. The interaction process is illustrated on the single axis drive position initialization procedure. The experiment is implemented using a high performance DSP/FPGA experimental board, supported with graphical programming environment