There is no more technically diverse market than the systems simulation market. There are system simulators for almost every inanimate and animate class of living and non-living things. Systems simulators are used in every science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field. System simulators are used to develop products like computers, cell phones, automobiles, and robots and predict events, like weather events or financial events. However that is not where system simulators stop. Besides being used to design everyday consumer products and predict everyday events, system simulators are also used to design buildings, farms, factories, hospitals, cities and transportation systems. There are also system simulators that are used to determine how safe a product or system is. Civil engineers make use of structural simulators to determine how a structure will withstand an earthquake or hurricane
The basic element of a system simulator is the model. When a robotic engineer sets out to design a robot, the engineer enlists the help of a robot system simulator. The robotic designer builds a virtual system model of the robot on a virtual platform from numerous lower level models that are selected from different libraries. These may include a sensor library, a motor library, an actuator library, an electronic component library and a software application library. Once built, the robotic engineer applies numerous virtual stimuli to the virtual robotic system model to verify that the robot design will work as intended.
A key differentiating factor in today’s system design world is the manufacturing and production of the system after the system design has been simulated and verified to work. In the ideal world, once a system design is simulated and the simulation results confirm that the design will work, the design should be able to be manufactured from the final system model specifications (that the system simulator generates).
However that is not always the case. The software and hardware used in the simulator design may not work correctly in an actual physical design. In that case, the engineer must determine if the problem is a result of poor manufacturing, or if the models in the simulator are correct, and if the simulator’s analysis of the interaction between those models is accurate. For robots, to solve the problem, the engineer might have to look at the physics equations used to model the robots moving parts.
