Control system development of large and high-groove density grating ruling engine based on real-time virtual hardware-in-the-loop simulation

In this paper, the control system development of a large and high-groove density grating ruling engine is presented. The grating ruling engine considered here was designed to rule gratings with a maximum ruled area of 400 mm (groove length) × 500 mm (width) and a highest groove density of 6000 grooves/mm. Three kinds of blank motion (stop-and-go blank motion, continuous blank motion and hybrid blank motion) should be obtained. However the ultra-precision mechanical structure and complicated driving method result in a long development period. To shorten the development time, a pure software real-time simulator based on real-time virtual hardware-in-the-loop simulation was invented, which can implement concurrent development of hardware and software. In this simulator, all the hardware is virtual. Their appearance and operation are programmed to imitate corresponding physical prototypes. Control logic can be developed using the simulator. After simulation development completed, the simulator was used as the final control software directly and the control logic was ported to control the real-world grating ruling engine by rewriting a small portion of the source code. The real-world system level testing result proves that real-time virtual hardware-in-the-loop simulation is an effective and efficient approach for developing the control system of a complicated system.