The subject of this paper is design, testing and implementation of voltage control of buck power electronics converter using programmable logic controller (PLC) which is based on Beckhoff technology. The proposed control structure is first modelled in the Matlab/Simulink software environment. The built Simulink model is then integrated and transferred to the TwinCAT 3 software which converts personal computer (PC)/laptop into the real-time PLC. This paper proposes an experimental platform consisting of the following components: laptop computer used as the PLC, Beckhoff input/output (I/O) interface, power electronics converter with gate driver module, and electronic modules for measuring and adjusting the signals between the converter and the Beckhoff PLC. In this paper, the control is implemented on the example of the buck converter. However, the proposed modular experimental platform can be used for any type of the converter. Thanks to the integration of the Matlab/Simulink and TwinCAT 3 software environments and the modularity of the platform, the proposed experimental platform is suitable for rapid prototyping of different control structures of power electronics converters, which is especially useful for educational and research purposes. The given experimental results validate excellent performances of the proposed platform.

We present a realization of a didactic robot environment for robot PUMA 560 for educational and research purposes. Robot PUMA 560 is probably the mathematically best-described robot, and therefore it is frequently used for research and educational purposes. A developed control environment consists of a robot controller and teach pendant. The advantage of using a personally developed solution is its open structure, which allows various tests and measurements to be performed, and that is highly convenient for educational and research purposes. The motivation behind the design of this personal didactic robot control environment arose from a survey for students after the first Summer School on Mechatronic Systems. The student questionnaire revealed severe discrepancies between theory and practice in education. Even though the primary purpose of the new control environment for robot PUMA 560 was research, it was established that it is a viable lab resource that allows for the connection between theoretical and industrial robotics. It was used for the duration of four Summer Schools and university courses. Since then, it has been fully integrated into International Burch University’s Electrical and Electronics Engineering curriculum through several courses on the bachelor and master levels for multidisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) projects.

In this paper we present two different, software and reconfigurable hardware, open architecture approaches to the PUMA 560 robot controller implementation, fully document them and provide the full design specification, software code and hardware description. Such solutions are necessary in today’s robotics and industry: deprecated old control units render robotic installations useless and allow no upgrades, advancements, or innovation in an inherently innovative ecosystem. For the sake of simplicity, just the first robot axis is considered. The first approach described is a PC solution with data acquisition I/O board (Humusoft MF634). This board is supported with Matlab Real-Time Windows Toolbox for real-time applications and thus whole controller was designed in Matlab environment. The second approach is a robot controller developed on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) board. The complexity of FPGA design can be overcome by using a third party software package, such as self-developed Matlab FPGA Real Time Toolbox. In both cases, parameters of motion controller are calculated by using simulation of the PUMA 560 robot first axis motion. Simulations were conducted in Matlab/Simulink using Robotics Toolbox.