Industrial Automation and Machinery

Industry Segments

• Motors, Drives, and Power Electronics
• Industrial Robotics and Manufacturing Equipment
• Process Automation Systems and Industrial Controls
• Power Generation and Distribution Equipment

Industrial Robotics and Manufacturing Equipment

Machinery designers and systems engineers must integrate motors and drives, industrial controls, and mechanical components into complex electromechanical systems. Without the ability to model system-level behavior, machine designers often rely on prior experience to configure separate components. Once these are integrated, the designer must set electric drive and controls parameters using the actual hardware, an expensive approach that can compromise system performance.

MATLAB® and Simulink® environments enable mechanical, electrical, and systems engineers to work together to analyze and simulate industrial robotics, material handling systems, factory automation equipment, and their associated controls. Using Simulink multidomain simulations together with electrical and mechanical libraries from the SimPowerSystems™, SimMechanics™, SimHydraulics®, and SimDriveline™ products, they optimize system performance and reduce the time and risk of experimenting on the real system. With Stateflow® software they incorporate supervisory and mode logic into the system simulation to define and test the logic controls of the equipment.

They use the Real-Time Workshop® product to automatically generate C code to implement control algorithms in a rapid prototyping system, such as xPC Target™, or directly on the embedded processor. They also generate code for plant models to create test systems and training simulations and use third-party products based on MathWorks software to automatically program FPGAs.

Océ developed a high-precision embedded control system to align printer drums on the CPS8000 direct imaging printer. They used MathWorks software to model the printer system and develop control algorithms, simulate the control system behavior, and generate and run code on a PC based, real-time rapid prototyping system.

Featured Customers

• Océ develops a high-precision system for aligning direct imaging drums for direct imaging printing technology.
• CARCO Electronics models a high-frequency motion simulator and its embedded controller and automatically generates the controller software.
• Instron develops a multi-axis simulator for dynamic loading.
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory develops control systems for vibration-free robotic arms to handle nuclear waste.

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