The Concept of Rapid Control Prototyping

In the process of control system development, simulation studies are usually carried out first, aiming at studying the feasibility of the technology, shortening the product development cycle and reducing the development cost. Simulation tools (e.g., MATLAB, SABER, etc.) have been of great help in the development of control systems since their application. However, in the traditional R&D process, most of them use pure mathematical simulation, and the confidence of such simulation results is limited. In recent years, semi-physical simulation systems with high confidence level involving some physical objects have been widely applied and developed. If the simulation of the actual controller is called the virtual controller, the simulation of the actual object is called the virtual object, you can get three forms of control system simulation:

① virtual controller + virtual object = dynamic simulation system, is a pure system simulation;

② virtual controller + actual object = Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) simulation system is a kind of semi-physical simulation of the system;

③ actual controller + virtual object = hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation system, is another kind of semi-physical simulation of the system.

Rapid control prototype simulation is in the second stage of control system development, well before product development, so that the designer's new control ideas (methods) can be easily and quickly tested on real-time hardware. Through real-time testing, problems can be identified in the early stages of design in order to modify the prototype or parameters, and then real-time testing, so that repeated, and ultimately produce a reasonable and feasible control prototype fully oriented to the user's needs.RapidECU