Design and Experimental Validation of a Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulator for Mechanisms with Link Flexibility

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the capabilities and potential of a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulator for the tuning of closed-loop control strategies used in flexible-links mechanisms. HIL is an increasingly popular methodology used in reducing the design and validation time of complex systems. This approach makes use of a software-programmed hardware prototype of the device under test, which is able to interact with other hardware devices and real-world signals. In this paper a validation of the proposed simulator, named FLiMHILS (Flexible Link Mechanisms HIL Simulator), will be obtained by comparing the dynamic behavior of a real single-link mechanism with the corresponding response of the simulator subject to the same stimuli and controller parameters. The experimental results show how the tuning parameters obtained with the HIL simulator can be successfully used to control the real mechanism. The real-time capable model which constitutes the core of the HIL simulator is a highly accurate FEM-based nonlinear model capable of describing with consistency the dynamics of different planar mechanisms with flexible links