Systematic Testing of Intelligent Mechatronic Systems in a Virtual Environment

This paper introduces a virtual reality-based approach for the systematic testing of intelligent mechatronic systems. The method of systematic testing is a model-based and formal testing method for the verification of the information processing of mechatronic systems. Systematic testing emerges from the field of embedded systems where it is used to evaluate the embedded electric circuits especially the discrete controllers, which are represented by these circuits. The challenge in the field of mechatronic is to evaluate and to understand the test results itself, in particular, the relations between the continuous behavior of the system, the reactions of controller, and the test inputs. Virtual reality facilitates the analysis of systematic tests by the combination of virtual 3D models and visualization techniques. The 3D models show the behavior of the system, visualizations explain the abstract test data. The paper explains the use of VR for the systematic testing, the created visualizations techniques and their benefit with an application example.Copyright © 2010 by ASME