I have exported the final model of the robot from Solidworks and have opened and organised the system in Simscape, applying all knowledge of the Torque control to this robot. Some problems/challenges appeared to be after the conversion and in this post I will explore how I problem-solved.
After finishing the CAD model, I have brought it to Simscape, and this was the resulting system:
After reorganising it I have reduced the system into smaller and more compact subsystems and only kept out of the subsystems the parts which was of interest to me.
Afterwards the new system looked like this:
The only things that I enabled to have actuation through Torque were the Revolute Joints of the wheels, created 2 separate PID closed loop controls for them and ran the simulation. When running it I noticed straight away that there was a huge problem with the system because some parts started flying away (classic):
When this hapenned, I knew that the issue was not with Simscape, but with Solidworks as the fully assembly was very complex (it has even the screws that hold the hexagonal parts onto the motor shafta, the coupling screws, etc). But before diving into Solidworks and try to troubleshoot diretly there, I decided to run the simulation in slow motion and pause to check from the components list which was the ones flying away so when I went back to Solidworks I could deal with those parts' mates directly.
I have made a short list and these were the parts flying:
Hex 1
Hex 2
Left Wheel
Right Wheel
M3 Shaft screw (right wheel)
M3 Shaft screw (left wheel)
To avoid any confusion, further issues or any direct problem with the mates of those parts, I deleted them and re-done them (the mates). Once finished, I re-imported the assembly into Simscape.