Digital twins of rotary motion and cart-pendulum platforms for education in automatic control

Abstract

[Abstract] Modern educational systems, similarly to Industry 4.0, are focusing their efforts to the development of new digital resources that allow to understand, simulate, predict, and optimize real systems through virtual replicas. In this sense, digital twins (DTs), which are high-fidelity virtual or digital representations of a physical product or process, are turning into a disruptive trend in the education sector and its influence is expected to be significant on future of many degrees, especially in engineering. This paper presents the DTs of three educational platforms which are widely used in automatic control for educative purposes: rotary motion equipment developed by Quanser, and a cart-pendulum platform developed by Feedback Instruments. The DTs have been built in the MATLAB®/Simulink© environment thanks to the physical modeling toolbox SimscapeTM through blocks contained in its libraries rather than using mathematical models. A set of possible control exercises that can be performed by students of automatic control courses are proposed, which are supported by the use of these educative resources.