Engineers and researchers at the Robotics and Mechatronics Center (RMC) of Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Rundfahrt (DLR, the German Aerospace Center), are developing robots capable of learning about and interacting with their environment. Among them is Agile Justin, one of the most advanced two-armed mobile humanoid robots in the world. Agile Justin has 53 degrees of freedom, including 19 in its upper body, 26 in its hands, and 8 in its mobile platform. It senses the environment via stereo cameras and RGB-D sensors in its head, torque sensors in all joints, and tactile sensors on the skin of its fingers.
The DLR RMC team used Model-Based Design with MATLAB® and Simulink® to develop advanced control, calibration, and path-planning algorithms for Agile Justin.
“Model-Based Design with MATLAB and Simulink covers a wide range of software domains needed for the design of advanced robotic systems,” says Berthold Bäuml, head of the autonomous learning robots lab at DLR. “It enables the simulation of complex mechatronic systems and controllers, code generation for real-time HIL testing, signal and image processing, and data analysis and visualization.”