NI LabVIEW-SolidWorks Mechatronics Toolkit (Alpha version 01)

The NI LabVIEW-SolidWorks Mechatronics Toolkit is designed to help you quickly develop complex multi-axis motion profiles for your machine and validate them using simulation. The toolkit enables you to design motion profiles, detect collisions, simulate the mechanical dynamics of your machine including mass and friction effects, estimate machine cycle time performance, validate component selections for motors, drives and mechanical transmissions, and evaluate engineering tradeoffs between the mechanical, electrical, control and embedded system aspects of the design.

This pre-release toolkit is the result of a partnership to integrate National Instruments LabVIEW with SolidWorks and COSMOSMotion for mechatronics oriented machine design. The toolkit is designed to enable virtual machine prototyping; the use of electromechanical simulation and design validation techniques to help you lower the cost and risk of designing machines with electronic control systems and motor drive actuators.

If you have a SolidWorks 3D CAD model, you could be simulating the mechanical and electrical performance of your machine in minutes. In the past, simulating the performance of a machine containing both mechanical and electrical components was a difficult and time consuming process that required highly specialized expertise. Today, these pioneering new mechatronics design tools are attempting to bring the electrical and mechanical worlds together and improve the design of next generation electronically controlled industrial equipment and machinery. Compared to older generation mechanical control systems, electronic controlled machinery delivers faster throughput, increased reliability, higher yield, quicker changeovers, reduced pollution and improved energy efficiency.

Typical applications for the NI LabVIEW-SolidWorks Mechatronics Toolkit include:

• Motion trajectory design. You can build complex motion profiles containing a series of sequential or concurrent move operations composed of 2D straight-line moves, contoured moves, and arc moves. For each move operation you can specify trapezoidal or S-curve profiles and apply velocity, acceleration, deceleration, and jerk constraints. The toolkit currently supports 2-dimensional coordinated motion profiles, and an unlimited number of un-coordinated motion axes. Each axis of motion in LabVIEW maps to a constrained joint in COSMOSMotion and is applied as a displacement versus time array.
• Visualization. By animating your 3D SolidWorks model using the motion control profiles and timing/sequencing logic you have designed in LabVIEW, you can quickly evaluate the feasibility of the overall conceptual design for your machine. Visualizing the working machine as a virtual prototype helps to validate the overall conceptual design for the machine very early in the development. This fosters better communication with customers and between design team members and helps to close the loop on the design requirements, must-have features and engineering tradeoffs. Visualization can also be used as a pre-sales tool when bidding on a project, since it enables you to show a working simulation of the machine to potential customers before you have built a physical prototype. Visualization results can be transferred from COSMOSMotion to SolidWorks Animator and then downloaded to eDrawings for sharing with customers.
• Collision detection. The collision detection feature in COSMOSMotion enables you to validate your motion profile designs using your actual 3D CAD model. You can check for interferences, evaluate the need for interlock control logic to prevent collisions, optimize your motion profiles to minimize unnecessary dead time, quickly evaluate what-if scenarios, and safely test new control system logic without the risk of damaging your physical machine. After your machine has been designed, prototyped and deployed to the field, collision detection can also be used to validate new motion profiles before downloading them to machines operating at your customer site; reducing the risk of unplanned downtime due to programming mistakes.
• Throughput time studies. By validating your motion system design using a simulation that includes the actual motion profile constraints and the mechanical dynamics of your machine such as mass and friction, you can accurately calculate an estimate for the cycle time throughput of your machine. LabVIEW indicates the profile duration (seconds) for your motion profiles at the end of the simulation.
• Motor, drive and transmission sizing. Motor torque and velocity requirements depend on the acceleration characteristics of your motion profile and the mechanical dynamics of the payload and transmission components such as lead screws. Using the toolkit, you can calculate the required motor torque and velocity charts for your motion profiles. COSMOSMotion simulations can include couplers that translate rotary motion into linear motion to simulate mechanical transmissions. COSMOSMotion simulations account for mechanical dynamic effects such as payload mass, friction and gravity; enabling you to validate the feasibility of your motion profile velocity and acceleration constraints and make more prudent design tradeoffs when selecting coupled electrical and mechanical components. COSMOSMotion uses the material properties in your SolidWorks model to automatically calculate the mass of solid bodies and to calculate the friction effects between materials such as acrylic and steel. By using the combined information from your motion profile kinematics and the mechanical dynamics of your machine, the toolkit enables you to more accurately size motors, drives and transmission components. The result is a highly optimized electromechanical design that improves performance while reducing cost and risk through more accurate design validation techniques. To view the torque and velocity profile charts for your motion profiles, right-click on the constrained joint in COSMOSMotion after the simulation is complete.
• Automated control system design (coming soon!). The design of mechatronic systems creates new challenges for development teams because the end performance of the machine depends on a complex interaction between the mechanical, electrical, and embedded control system components of the design. However, the use of advanced control design techniques to optimize machine control system performance and robustness has historically been limited by the lack of a high quality dynamic model of the mechanical and electrical motor/drive dynamics. Without a good model, the use of model-based control design techniques has limited practical use in industry. New mechatronics design tools significantly lower the complexity of electromechanical system modeling; in this case SolidWorks and COSMOSMotion make it easy to obtain a mechanical dynamics model and LabVIEW provides an electrical model of the motor, drive and the control system software. This information can be used to determine the requirements for your embedded control system such as the required control loop rate (Hz) to achieve high performance control based on the electromechanical dynamics of the machine. (As a rule of thumb, the control loop rate should be at least 10 times faster than the gain crossover bandwidth of the electromechanical system.) In addition, you can use a knowledge of the combined frequency response function (FRF) characteristics of your motor drive, mechanical transmission and payload to more easily design a highly optimized control system for your machine. These techniques can simplify the control design process and also help you detect problems long before the physical prototype is built, enabling you to mitigate issues such as mechanical resonance through a combined effort of your mechanical, electrical and control design engineers. Implementing these techniques early in the development process can lead to more prudent engineering design tradeoffs. The result is a reduction in development time, cost and risk while simultaneously improving the performance and reliability of the machine.

[+] Enlarge Image

Figure 1. Toolkit demo showing a sequential 2D straight line and arc move trajectory designed in LabVIEW and then sent to COSMOSMotion for dynamic simulation and visualization. (Note that the "Axis 1" and "Axis 2" motion axis names in LabVIEW match the constrained joint names in COSMOSMotion.)

Online Training and Tutorial Webcasts

View this free webcast series to learn how you can use this toolkit. The series features tutorials on how virtual machine prototyping technology can help you bring your machine to life before you've ordered a single part: visualize motion, size motors, evaluate performance, design control logic, optimize throughput, and more. Then reuse the same software you created for simulating the machine when you transition your mechanical, electrical and control system design from virtual prototype to physical prototype and then to a high volume deployment for your customers.

View Virtual Machine Prototyping Training Webcasts Now

Required Software

• SolidWorks 2007 (product information )
• COSMOSMotion 2007 (product information)
• LabVIEW 8.2 or higher (product information, online, download, or DVD evaluations )
• NI Motion Assistant 2.0 or higher (product information, download evaluation version )
  
  NOTE: No version of SolidWorks higher than SolidWorks 2007 is supported in this version of the toolkit

Release Notes: NI LabVIEW-SolidWorks Mechatronics Toolkit (Alpha Version 01)

This is an alpha pre-release version of the toolkit intended for lead-users who are interested in evaluating the technology. This version has known issues and limitations. Please review the readme file included in the attachment for details. If you encounter an issue or bug, please report it by emailing mechatronics@ni.com with detailed information on the problem and instructions on how to reproduce the issue.

Downloads

mechatronics_01.zip

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