Shantanu Ghorpade
SVT Robotics
Aug 8, 2023
Period
- 2021
Testimonial
I mostly used Matlab during my Bachelor's and my Master's
Pros:
- Convenient to use for complex math calculations like partial differential equations
- Good for learning the coded math behind finite element analysis
- Good for heat transfer simulations and calculations
- Good for simulating a robot's kinematic mechanism
Cons
- Not the best simulation software out there
- Not the best platform to write/edit code
Riccardo Bezzini
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Jun 12, 2023
Period
- 2022
Title
I used Matlab for multiple applications
Simulation of robotic devices
Implementation and testing of controllers
Optimization processes for design purposes
Pro
Versatility
Great documentation
Usability
quality of implemented algorithms
many different useful packages and functions
Con
sometimes difficult to use at its full potential
Robot
Mathematica
Marcello Pantano
INTECS
Jun 2, 2023
Period
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
Title
I have used Matlab evironment for almost my entire academic and professional use in several different applications. Some of them consist of developing and simulate control or navigation algorithms for many different dynamic systems, like robot manipulator, mobile robot, underwater vehicles or road vehicles. I also used Matlab/Simulink in order to produce software for automotive embedded system starting from the models.
Pro
Possibility to easily implement and simulate complex algorithm.
Availability of libraries and toolbox for several applications
Con
Limited compatibilty with Hardware in deploy applications
Michele Galullo
Leonardo
May 21, 2023
Period
- 2018
Title
I have used MATLAB to synthetize many control algorithms for many types of systems. I also simulated and compared some estimation algorithms (e.g. Kalman filter, ...). Matlab is also very useful for analyzing the performance of the control algorithm in various scenarios and uncertainties of the system parameters
Pro
A lot of documentation and examples. Easy to use, Intuitive. A lot of toolbox for a lot of scientific topics.
Con
Code generator is not good for the standard of Industries. Not easy to interface with other product.
Robot
I used matlab mainly for simulation of algorithm and dynamic systems
Stefano Maugeri
Intecs
May 6, 2023
Period
- 2022
Title
I have been working with Matlab since 2017. During these years Matlab was improved with several useful tools, that help you to easily carry on your project.
Matlab can be used with projects of different types. For example, I used it to simulate the dynamics of a robot manipulator, and it was very easy with the ready-to-use library of the Robotics Toolbox.
Matlab becomes a more powerful tool if it is combined with simulink, where the dynamics simulation of complex systems (like a robot manipulator is) became almost trivial.
Matlab, being a scripting language, provide also several ways to debug your code, even with a code debugger.
Pro
The documentation is the point of force of Matlab, of course. For each project I had to work with Matlab, I have always found several libraries with well-written documentation and also examples.
There is also a good community, that can help you when you get in trouble. And of course, nowadays internet is full of resolved by the community problems.
Moreover, I usually work with matrices, and checking its dimension can be quite difficult sometimes. Matlab integrates a powerful tool to do this check by itself.
The embedded coder is very simple to use. I see also several companies working with that.
Con
I dislike the lack of backwards compatibility between two versions of Matlab. Also because, with the loss of backwards compatibility, online guides also lose effectiveness.
This problem emerges especially when using simulink, trying to open a project created with a previous version.
a big improvement can be made by Matlab when it is used as a low-level code generator (eg in C). The generated code is usually very messy and difficult to understand, it would be better to have well-organized generated code instead.
Robot
UR5
Giorgio Simonini
Research Centre E. Piaggio
Feb 3, 2023
Period
- 2022
Title
I use Matlab for long in the university studies and for research as well. As a scripting languages the use case was various, from robotic simulations to data analysis or controller design. I used some toolboxes: control system, robotic systems, symbolic math, simulink. The matlab core was used for generic stuff like matrix calcolous and plotting.
Pro
Coding is simple and it provides a large amount of functions that covers the majority of the needs. Community and documentation is big, so it is easy to troubleshoot the code. There are a lot of extension called toolboxes, each related to an area of interest. It is difficult to find a problem not covered by them.
Con
Not cheap, good for companies or universities but expensive for little realities where there are alternatives. Sometimes it crash, specially with large symbolic or compiling stuffs. Slow, as many high level programming languages, real time applications could be problematic is complex tasks.