Date of Award

5-2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Dawson, Darren

Abstract

Mechatronics systems are often a close interleaving of different aspects of hardware, software, control and mechanical design. Two such aspects are delved into in greater detail for this thesis, both related to software development.
Simulations are used to know the practical conditions under which a control design is effective. The system simulated in this case was a multiple vehicle system, where the vehicles navigated from source to a destination configuration avoiding two different kinds of obstacles.
Post simulation, a system is implemented using hardware and tested using an experimental setup. Data Acquisition Boards such as the Quanser Q4 are used to read the system state. A device driver interface containing a wide variety of functions was developed and extensively tested for the Q4 PCI bus card.
Both these projects were software development efforts towards contributing to different aspects of Robotics and Mechatronics projects in the Controls and Robotics Group.

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