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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mech. Eng.
Sec. Mechatronics
Volume 10 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmech.2024.1451042
This article is part of the Research Topic Global Excellence in Mechatronics: North America View all 3 articles

Hardware-in-the-Loop Controller Testing and Visualization of an Industrial Gantry

Provisionally accepted
Matheus Leao Moreira Matheus Leao Moreira 1*Sabri Cetin Sabri Cetin 1Antonio Gomez-Badillo Antonio Gomez-Badillo 1Bashar Albakri Bashar Albakri 1Raminder Singh Raminder Singh 1Young Soo Park Young Soo Park 2Venugopal Varma Venugopal Varma 3
  • 1 University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, United States
  • 2 Argonne National Laboratory (DOE), Lemont, Illinois, United States
  • 3 Oak Ridge National Laboratory (DOE), Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In factory automation applications, the embedded control system components are often available as off-the-shelf products, while the mechanical components and environment in which they will work are still under development. Thus, the need arises to test control systems without the final assembly. This paper introduces a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) virtual environment for control system testing, design planning, and operator training. Controller hardware and software are configured as in the actual application, whereas electro-mechanical components are virtually constructed using Unreal Engine 5 and Matlab Simulink. Motion data from the model can be used to optimize the actuator controller, make physical design assessments, and predict possible failure scenarios such as software/hardware malfunctions. The environment is used to validate an industrial gantry robot's control systems and structural design. The testing is successful in using real-time controller inputs to generate visual display and physical assessments of the robot's design. Similar techniques can be applied to simulate different robot configurations using Codesys and Unreal Engine 5 or similar programs.

    Keywords: Robotics, Digital-twin, Embedded controller, CoDeSys, MATLAB, Simulink, Unreal engine

    Received: 18 Jun 2024; Accepted: 06 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Leao Moreira, Cetin, Gomez-Badillo, Albakri, Singh, Park and Varma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Matheus Leao Moreira, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.