| Mechatronics systems are often a close interleaving of different aspects of hardware, software, control and mechanical design. Two such aspects are delved into in greater detail for this thesis, both related to software development.; Simulations are used to know the practical conditions under which a control design is effective. The system simulated in this case was a multiple vehicle system, where the vehicles navigated from source to a destination configuration avoiding two different kinds of obstacles.; Post simulation, a system is implemented using hardware and tested using an experimental setup. Data Acquisition Boards such as the Quanser Q4 are used to read the system state. A device driver interface containing a wide variety of functions was developed and extensively tested for the Q4 PCI bus card.; Both these projects were software development efforts towards contributing to different aspects of Robotics and Mechatronics projects in the Controls and Robotics Group. |
