A microcontroller based test platform for controller design

This paper presents a microcontroller based emulator which is developed for the design-test-and-redesign of controllers through examining the controller candidates on the emulated plants operating under the created real-time and real environmental conditions. The analog and digital peripheral units of the plant emulator provide the recreation of the real environmental conditions such that the whole emulator runs as if the real plant whenever the model implemented in the microcontroller is a right model for the plant. The emulator has the flexibility of changing the plant model and/or its parameters manually and it also enables to apply, in an automatic way, analog disturbances and analog parameter perturbations to the plant model. The developed plant emulator communicated with the simulator of the controller part both managed by a graphical user interface implemented in the computer constitutes a controller design-test-redesign platform which has the advantages of using simulated plants in the controller design providing a test-flexibility and also of testing the controller candidates on the emulated plants operating under the conditions very close to the real situations, so assuring the desired controller performances.