Robotic design choice overview using co-simulation
This work addresses the need for multi-disciplinary tools in rapid robotic system development, though it appears incremental as it applies existing co-simulation methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of exploring robotic design alternatives by presenting a collaborative modeling method that combines discrete-event controller models with continuous-time physical component models, using VDM and 20-sim tools, and demonstrated it with a mobile robot feeding system to provide developers with an overview of solution impacts for selecting viable candidates.
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software with continuous-time models of physical robot components. The presented co-modeling method utilized VDM for discrete-event and 20-sim for continuous-time modeling. The collaborative modeling method is illustrated with a concrete example of collaborative model development of a mobile robot animal feeding system. Simulations are used to evaluate the robot model output response in relation to operational demands. The result of the simulations provides the developers with an overview of the impacts of each solution instance in the chosen design space. Based on the solution overview the developers can select candidates that are deemed viable to be deployed and tested on an actual physical robot.