A Case Study for Tooling the Design Trajectory of Embedded Control Systems

We strive to allow a mechatronic system designer the power of designing mechatronic systems in manners of concurrent engineering in short time at a fraction of the present day costs. In our context, this means a methodology and tool support to stepwise refinement in analysis and design of the plant to be controlled, computing and I/O hardware and computer code which provide all operational functionalities. Nowadays, it is impossible to separate control engineering from software engineering. There is no way of implementing control strategies other than transform them in computer code for chosen processing target. Usually, there are not many "general-purpose programmers" available in control engineering research teams in companies and universities. In these cases, used software development techniques suffer from insufficiencies in knowledge in disciplines of software modeling, familiarity with concurrency in software, ways of allowing for reusability, software testing and so on. The gap between control laws design and implementing them on the targeted platform(s) is recognized as critical and not methodologically covered by existing approaches and tools. This paper, reporting on the progress of project TES.5224, presents evolution of a system based on a 2DOF robot as a prototype of a design trajectory.