Simulation question 1

[sboyce]

I'm designing a wheeled robot and I'm just wondering what add-ins and products from MATLAB and Simulink would be useful. The websites tout a lot about their abilities but not much about their limitations so I was hoping to get some input from someone who had done something similar in the past.

-Sam Boyce
Asst. Mechanical Engineer

http://www.AppleAid.com

 

[IRstuff]

Seems like a more appropriate question is what do YOU want to do with Matlab? If you don't know what you are going to do with it, then it's unlikely that you'll even get to the point of running into any limitations.

TTFN

 

[sboyce]

Yeah sorry, guess I should have been more clear. I'm looking to create a physical simulation of a robot in different environments. I want to be able to see its dynamics and if it will be able to clear obstacles and such.

-Sam Boyce
Asst. Mechanical Engineer

http://www.AppleAid.com

 

[tgeorge]

I have a question about Mathlab's capabilities as well. Myself, I am looking to do some discrete event simulation, statistical modelling, global optimization, curve fitting, and other data analysis features and have it all be portable to Excel, or ideally, with "zoomability, rotatability, and panability" of 3D plots inside of Powerpoint preferably. That last bit is nto for me, its to make the upper level types go "wowweee and neato."

Where I get confused, is finding the right applications to do just that.

For the Simulations side:
I get that I need Matlab, and I think I need Simulink. But do I need SimEvent as well? It kinda seems like Simulink can do SimEvent, but I have no experience with that.

On the stats side:
What applications do I need mainly for nonlinear, non polynomial curve fitting?
What distributions are inside of Matlab? When it says basic statistics and curve fitting, what does that entail? Does this include some basic distributions such as a Gaussian, Binomial, T, etc... What additional capabilities would having the statistics toolbox have in relation to that?

 

[sboyce]

tgeorge: You might try looking at the optimization tool box for your curve fitting needs. From what I hear it is very robust. As far as your distributions question, MATLAB certainly has the capabilitiy to generate random numbers in a gaussian distribution. I'm not sure about the others.

-Sam Boyce
Asst. Mechanical Engineer

http://www.AppleAid.com

 

[tgeorge]

Thanks Sboyce!

 

[IRstuff]

"physical simulation of a robot in different environments. I want to be able to see its dynamics and if it will be able to clear obstacles and such."

That's not something that Matlab will do readily. You should be doing that in your mechanical design program, or possibly exporting the mechanical structure into another program like CARSIM:

http://www.carsim.com/products/carsim/

TTFN