OPEN SOURCE APPLICATIONS FOR RAPID CONTROL PROTOTYPING IN EDUCATION LABORA TORIES

Laboratories take a central role in engineering education. The market offers ready-to-use solutions for control engineering and mechatronics courses. One can buy a complete system composed of a plant, of I/O boards and software components. Such solutions are based on proprietary components and lack the necessary flexibility in setting up new experiments and do not provide platforms for working on disciplinary details when desired from a didactic point of view. Moreover, the future engineer is not confronted with methods and tools that will be used later in industry. Systems based on commercial components are also not flexible enough (because they are thought for dedicated tasks and for being used as is without "internal" modifications) and are often very expensive. The mechatronic laboratory at SUPSI proposes a completely new approach, which offers high flexibility, exploits industrial components and is based on industrial tools methods at low costs. In order to increase the value of the laboratory to students and to reduce the cost of its creation and operation, a modular approach has been implemented, which relies on sensors and actuators communicating through the CAN bus as a standard communication protocol. A normal PC is used as the control unit while the real-time determinism is guaranteed by the Linux RTAI operating system. A library of interfaces for many CAN capable devices has been implemented both for Matlab/Simulink and for ScicosLab. Rapid control prototyping techniques can be used to generate code for existing applications or to build new applications based on available devices. Additional devices can also be easily added thanks to the modular software.