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Announcement - Agenda - Paper Presentations

The proposed paper presents how RTLinux and STRTL can beneficially be utilized within student lab exercises geared towards the use of modern software development tools. Because we consider it important for students of engineering subject to get familiar with a typical development process. In a particular lab course, in the mechatronics curriculum, students should run through all phases of control system design, code generation and implementation with the MATLAB/Simulink environment and the STRTL interface. Using commercial rapid prototyping tools (e. g. dSpace, LabView,. . . ) causes rather high software licens- ing and hardware fees. Especially at universities money is scarce. Hence to reduce the costs a tutorial to use a low cost rapid control prototyping based on open source software is described in this paper. First of all the main parts of the system hardware setup, rapid control prototyping and STRTL toolbox are introduced. Then short introductory examples are presented to demonstrate the functionality of the system and to become acquainted with the developing environment.

The main part comprises extended student lab exercises. These exercises (basic i/o routines, digital signal processing examples and closed-loop-controller design) should train the students in model identification, controller design, simulation and finally compare the simulation results with the real hardware. We conclude our paper with some remarks and the reference to our website where the examples can be downloaded freely.