The Unified Simulation Environment-Envision Telerobotics and Matlab Merged into One Application

The kernels of Matlab and Envision Telerobotics (TR) were merged on the SGI platform, taking advantage of Matlab Engine and the open architecture of Envision TR, designing a new robot simulation environment called the Flexible Unified Simulation Environment (FUSE). Envision TR is a time-continuous graphical robot simulation program from DELMIA Inc. In FUSE, Matlab is able to take advantage of geometrical libraries for most commercial robots on the market and the optimized graphical kernel for real-time 3D applications offered by Envision TR. Envision TR is gained by full access to Matlabs vectorized calculation environment accelerating either the speed of execution at run-time, in some cases above the speed that compiled C-code offers, or at debugging and software simulation, offering the capability to modify the software at run-time, altering the program flow instantly in the middle of program execution. In addition, development of new robot systems are optimized by the ability of using specialized Matlab toolboxes in diverse application areas, such as statistics, automatic control and artificial neural networks, minimizing the software development time, effort and risks taken in major robot projects. FUSE was used in the Rower-2 project, a European Union project aimed to develop a robot system for automatic arc-welding of hulls in tanker ships. The seam-tracking and sensor control software developed in FUSE were implemented in the target QNX embedded system.