Windows-based real-time control of direct-drive mechanisms: platform description and experiments

Modern industrial automation plants require control software with real-time features. Technological advances allow to use personal computers to achieve this goal. On the other hand, direct-drive mechanisms have shown to be a good choice wherever there is the requirement of fast and accurate positioning as well as precise torque control. The aim of this paper is to describe and evaluate WinMechLab, a real-time PC-based platform for the simulation and control of mechanisms in a Windows environment. In order to show the feasibility and versatility of this platform, the evaluation is carried out on two different direct-drive mechanisms, comparing the performance of two well-known model-based tracking control algorithms.

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