One of the problems in control engineering is that a controller in a simulation environment can be different from the actual implemented controller on a microcontroller and the implemented controller can only be tested on the physical plant, which can be dangerous and costly if the controller is not stable or contains a bug. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) Simulation can help solve this issue because it enables testing of the implemented controller running on its computer connected to hardware that simulates the plant in real-time. Such a simulated plant is called a digital twin of the physical plant. If the implemented controller is stable and performs well it can be safely connected to the physical plant.
The main goal of this project is to create and test a framework for HIL simulation setups. A user can use this framework with their own plant model and controller to create a digital twin for HIL simulation. The framework will be tested with a simple plant and controller. Both the real-time plant and the controller must be implemented on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Icoboard FPGA.