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The Real Time Controls Laboratory, (RTiC-Lab)

Control may require an exhaustive tuning process during the early stages of the ACS's life. During this stage, the controls engineer performs thorough plant characterization and evaluation. Using this new-found information, the controls engineer can then proceed to tune the controller. For that, the controls engineer needs soft real time access to plant I/O, controller states, controller parameters, and set points.

The Real Time Controls Laboratory or RTiC-Lab (pronounced Arctic-Lab) is explicitly designed by the main author of this work to be used not only during these early stages of controller design and plant characterization, but also during production monitoring and control. This implies that this software is both intended to be a research application tool and a commercial grade application. Designed and tested at the University of Virginia's Rotating Machinery and Controls Laboratory under application of AMB control, it provides an environment in which to implement controller algorithms while providing real time access to controller states, plant outputs, controller actions, controller parameters, and other controller information. All this information can be plotted and filtered - via user defined filters - in soft real time. The user can further filter the necessary data either in real time or post mortem. Last and most importantly, the controller parameters can be updated in real time through a user-defined graphical user interface.

RTiC-Lab incorporates several of the most critical scheduling algorithms that are especially suited to AMB and any other system that can use both fixed rate and event driven controllers. Priority assignment has been employed with Liu and Layland's RMA scheduling algorithm. Data is synchronized via priority inheritance protocols, and is transmitted from the hard real time tasks to the graphical user interface via real time FIFOs.

RTiC-Lab has two very important features not found in any other current real time controls implementation platforms. The first and most important one is that RTiC-Lab is and will be Open Source Software. That is, users of RTiC-Lab can download the source code via the web, and are heavily encouraged to add to and improve this code1.11. The second feature is that RTiC-Lab is designed to be distributed over a common network of personal computers. That is, RTiC-Lab can be used over a common 10/100 Mb Ethernet network. In conclusion, RTiC-Lab has been designed to be free, extremely flexible, organic, and powerful enough to handle very large tasks.

In order to understand the innards of RTiC-Lab, one must understand RTLinux. RTLinux is described in what follows.



Subsections
next up previous
Next: The Real Time Linux Up: Introduction Previous: Remarks
Michael Barabanov 2001-06-19