Designing Digital Twin of a Three Wheeled Robot Using Simscape for Trajectory Tracking
Keywords:
Digital twin, Simscape Multibody, Dynamic, Trajectory tracking, Mobile robotAbstract
Due to the increased production costs, one of the areas of interest in the industry is the development of digital twins of autonomous mobile robots in order to predict their behavior using different control algorithms and validate them in a virtual environment. For this purpose, this paper presents the design of a digital twin of a three wheeled mobile robot using the Simscape Multibody and Matlab/Simulink tools to enable precise real-time tracking and virtual testing. The framework initiates by exporting an accurate 3D assembly of the robot from Solidworks to Simscape to replicate the kinematics, geometric constraints and inertial properties of the physical model. The imported model is then enhanced by adding actuator dynamics, sensor blocks and wheel-ground contact friction forces. The usefulness of the proposed model is demonstrated through a closed loop dynamic simulation of tracking a predefined path. Obtained results prove that the developed robot digital twin can be reliably used to predict the dynamic behavior of this type of robots and validate control strategies to be applied. Further, the proposed methodology will help to have a correct digital representation of the robot and to reduce both time and cost of research and development.References
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