Innovative Tools for Development and Didactics of Mechatronic Systems

The design of mechatronic systems involves the disciplines of mechanics, electronics and software. The goal of the EasyKit project is to speed up the development process of mechatronic systems by parallelizing the development of these disciplines, hence minimizing development time and increasing reliability through reusability. EasyKit consists of a library of hardware and software modules and the model-based development tool EasyLab. The hardware modules from the Match-X construction kit enable fast assembly of mechatronic systems.

The development environment EasyLab offers data flow-oriented as well as state-oriented modeling of the software for the mechatronic application. A palette of software building blocks reflects the modular structure of the hardware components. The modeled application logic is used to generate source code that is especially suitable for resourceconfined target platforms.

At the same time, we are developing meaningful experimental setups in association with our partners from the industry and academic aera, which demonstrate the efficiency of the system.

This work is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

People

• Dipl.-Inf. Simon Barner
• Dipl.-Inf. Michael Geisinger
• Jia Huang, M.Sc.

Partners

• digiraster Tetzner GmbH
• efm-systems GmbH
• Festo Didactic GmbH & Co. KG
• KSB AG
• Pumpenfabrik Ernst Scherzinger GmbH & Co. KG
• TU Ilmenau, Fakultät für Informatik und Automatisierung

Links

• EasyKit project web-site (in German)
• EasyKit at PTKA (in German)
• EasyKit at TransMechatronic.de (in German)

News

• 2009/11/11: EasyKit Workshop.The results of the 3-year project EasyKit were presented in a workshop hosted by Festo in Esslingen-Berkheim. Program points included talks by the project contributors and a hands-on workshop session. Prsentation slides and further material can be found in the News section on the EasyKit Website.

• 2009/10/14: Final presentation: The results of the EasyKit project have been presented in the course of VDMA Forum Mechatronik in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The presentation slides are available for download.

• June 2009: Publication on GWR09 (see below)
  We presented a way to extend EasyLab towards use in robotics at the German Workshop on Robotics 2009 (GWR09), which took place in Braunschweig, Germany. The slides from the talk as well as the paper itself are available for download. The full proceedings are available at Springer Verlag.

• April 2009: New team member
  Jia Huang has joined the EasyKit team.

• March 2009: New project web site launched
  The new website www.easy-kit.de offers information on the EasyKit project. It is intended as a knowledge database describing the development process and tools created in the course of the project and to introduce some example applications.

• November 2008: EasyKit at the SPS/IPC/DRIVES in Nürnberg
  EasyKit and EasyLab were presented at the electrical automation trade fair running from November 25 to 27, 2008 as part of a joint stand with project partner efm-systems GmbH and associated partner REC GmbH. The fair covers all components down to the system and offers herewith integrated automation solutions.

• October 2008: Publication on MESA2008 (see below)
  This paper, which was presented on IEEE/ASME International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications 2008 in Beijing, China (MESA08), gives a very good overview over the goals of the project as well as the software architecture and also introduces two demonstration setups.

• August 2008: Publication on SPIE Optics and Photonics 2008 (see below)
  Martin Wojtczyk used EasyKit and EasyLab to design an adaptive light source for mobile manipulators.

• March 2008: EasyKit at KAG2008 in Karlsruhe
  The first version of EasyLab was presented at Karlsruher Arbeitsgespräche 2008.

Publications