Reach your goals faster – with the DSA-Toolbox for Matlab/Simulink

It is not a rare scenario that the implementation of an experimental setup will take the lion's share of a research project to complete. Often, data acquisition and framework are needlessly developed from scratch. This ties up resources unnecessarily, and will hold the researcher from his research.

To provide a convenient framework for the work with tactile sensor systems in research and development, Weiss Robotics, together with the Institute for Process Control and Robotics (IPR) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed a Toolbox which aims to integrate tactile sensor systems from Weiss Robotics in the twinkling of an eye into Matlab/Simulink-based models.

DSA-Toolbox

Heart of the library is the DSA-Element, which receives the acquired tactile pressure profile data online from the DSA-Explorer and provides it via a splitter as a matrix element to the model. So, the pressure profile data can be easily used with existing components of the Simulink toolboxes, e.g. the Imaging Toolbox, which dramatically shortens the time for realizing experimental testbeds in comparison to conventional C/C++ based implementation.

For a quick start, various example models are included, which can be easily customized and extended to your application.

Communication

Communication with the DSA-Explorer is done using a UDP socket connection, so the Matlab-Application can be either locally installed or being running on a remote computer. Although the DSA-Toolbox was developed for the online processing of tactile sensor data, it can be feed for testing purposes with previously recorded pressure profiles, too. This will, for example enable a precise parameter examination for control algorithms or an evaluation of variants using a defined input data.

Real time capable

To realize a controller in real time, the DSA-Toolbox can be combined with Matlab's Realtime-Workshop. This allows to realize even complex controllers for reactive grasping to be realized in a manageable amount of time.

Availability

The DSA-Toolbox is now available as an option with the Professional Edition of our data acquisition software DSA Explorer - please contact us for more details!