Integrated Design and Implementation of Embedded Control Systems with Scilab

Embedded systems are playing an increasingly important role in control engineering. Despite their popularity, embedded systems are generally subject to resource constraints and it is therefore difficult to build complex control systems on embedded platforms. Traditionally, the design and implementation of control systems are often separated, which causes the development of embedded control systems to be highly time-consuming and costly. To address these problems, this paper presents a low-cost, reusable, reconfigurable platform that enables integrated design and implementation of embedded control systems. To minimize the cost, free and open source software packages such as Linux and Scilab are used. Scilab is ported to the embedded ARM-Linux system. The drivers for interfacing Scilab with several communication protocols including serial, Ethernet, and Modbus are developed. Experiments are conducted to test the developed embedded platform. The use of Scilab enables implementation of complex control algorithms on embedded platforms. With the developed platform, it is possible to perform all phases of the development cycle of embedded control systems in a unified environment, thus facilitating the reduction of development time and cost.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; Open Access at http://www.mdpi.org/sensors/papers/s8095501.pd

EVALUATION OF A MODELING AND AUTOMATIC C CODE GENERATION TOOLSET AS AN OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION

International audienceThis paper is focused on the model based design (MBD) approach, more particularly on the automatic C code generation. The goal of our project consists in evaluating how far the toolset called Scilab-Scicos and GeneAuto can be used as the open source alternatives to other solutions

Teaching Introductory Differential Equations with ScicosLab

Perhaps the largest and most capable open source software for doing applied mathematics is the open source package Scicoslab. Widely used in Europe and Asia it is less well known in the United States. In this article we will explain how ScicosLab can be easily used to help teach differential equations and to also introduce students to a software package that they can take with them for the rest of their careers

Dengue disease, basic reproduction number and control

Dengue is one of the major international public health concerns. Although progress is underway, developing a vaccine against the disease is challenging. Thus, the main approach to fight the disease is vector control. A model for the transmission of Dengue disease is presented. It consists of eight mutually exclusive compartments representing the human and vector dynamics. It also includes a control parameter (insecticide) in order to fight the mosquito. The model presents three possible equilibria: two disease-free equilibria (DFE) and another endemic equilibrium. It has been proved that a DFE is locally asymptotically stable, whenever a certain epidemiological threshold, known as the basic reproduction number, is less than one. We show that if we apply a minimum level of insecticide, it is possible to maintain the basic reproduction number below unity. A case study, using data of the outbreak that occurred in 2009 in Cape Verde, is presented.Comment: This is a preprint of a paper whose final and definitive form has appeared in International Journal of Computer Mathematics (2011), DOI: 10.1080/00207160.2011.55454

A comparison of software engines for simulation of closed-loop control systems

A wide array of control system design and simulation software engines is available in market. It includes MATLAB-Simulink, LabVIEW, Maple-MapleSim, Scilab-Scicos, VisSim and Mathematica-Control Professional Suite (CPS). Among all of them MATLAB-Simulink is dominant and widely used software engine. The main aim of this study is to implement different state space control methods for non-linear Furuta pendulum system in each one of them and to compare performance against MATLAB-Simulink. Different parameters like learning curve, interoperability, flexibility, control design tools, documentation and tech support are considered for efficiency comparison. It is shown that MapleSim has multi-body intuitive physical modeling (acausal) approach faster than Simulink with unique control animation feature. It is found that MapleSim has the ability to generate differential equations from acausal modeling. It was verified that differential equations generated by MapleSim were similar to original equations. Scilab-Scicos is cost-efficient being open source engine with all control design and simulation capability similar to Matlab-Simulink. LabVIEW has better front end and back end for control design simulation at the cost of steep learning curve. VisSim has complete symbolic modeling approach with great flexibility and ease of learning. Mathematica\u27s Control System Professional does not have symbolic modeling capability. It is observed that CPS has a cumbersome approach for modeling non linear systems

Systems control theory applied to natural and synthetic musical sounds

Systems control theory is a far developped field which helps to study stability, estimation and control of dynamical systems. The physical behaviour of musical instruments, once described by dynamical systems, can then be controlled and numerically simulated for many purposes. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to provide the theoretical background on linear system theory, both in continuous and discrete time, mainly in the case of a finite number of degrees of freedom ; second, to give illustrative examples on wind instruments, such as the vocal tract represented as a waveguide, and a sliding flute

Model-Based Development of Distributed Embedded Systems by the Example of the Scicos/SynDEx Framework

The embedded systems engineering industry faces increasing demands for more functionality, rapidly evolving components, and shrinking schedules. Abilities to quickly adapt to changes, develop products with safe design, minimize project costs, and deliver timely are needed. Model-based development (MBD) follows a separation of concerns by abstracting systems with an appropriate intensity. MBD promises higher comprehension by modeling on several abstraction-levels, formal verification, and automated code generation. This thesis demonstrates MBD with the Scicos/SynDEx framework on a distributed embedded system. Scicos is a modeling and simulation environment for hybrid systems. SynDEx is a rapid prototyping integrated development environment for distributed systems. Performed examples implement well-known control algorithms on a target system containing several networked microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators. The addressed research question tackles the feasibility of MBD for medium-sized embedded systems. In the case of single-processor applications experiments show that the comforts of tool-provided simulation, verification, and code-generation have to be weighed against an additional memory consumption in dynamic and static memory compared to a hand-written approach. Establishing a near-seamless modeling-framework with Scicos/SynDEx is expensive. An increased development effort indicates a high price for developing single applications, but might pay off for product families. A further drawback was that the distributed code generated with SynDEx could not be adapted to microcontrollers without a significant alteration of the scheduling tables. The Scicos/SynDEx framework forms a valuable tool set that, however, still needs many improvements. Therefore, its usage is only recommended for experimental purposes.Comment: 146 pages, Master's Thesi