Towards a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud through Operable Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines

In last decade, the paradigm of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has integrated industrial manufacturing systems with Cloud Computing technologies for Cloud Manufacturing. Up to 2015, there were many CPS-based manufacturing systems that collected real-time machining data to perform remote monitoring, prognostics and health management, and predictive maintenance. However, these CPS-integrated and network ready machines were not directly connected to the elements of Cloud Manufacturing and required human-in-the-loop. Addressing this gap, we introduced a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) that bridges a gap between physical machines and virtual space in 2017. CPMC virtualizes machine tools in cloud through web services for direct monitoring and operations through Internet. Fundamentally, CPMC differs with contemporary modern manufacturing paradigms. For instance, CPMC virtualizes machining tools in cloud using remote services and establish direct Internet-based communication, which is overlooked in existing Cloud Manufacturing systems. Another contemporary, namely cyber-physical production systems enable networked access to machining tools. Nevertheless, CPMC virtualizes manufacturing resources in cloud and monitor and operate them over the Internet. This dissertation defines the fundamental concepts of CPMC and expands its horizon in different aspects of cloud-based virtual manufacturing such as Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines. Digital Twin (DT) is another evolving concept since 2002 that creates as-is replicas of machining tools in cyber space. Up to 2018, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art DTs, which only focused on monitoring production lifecycle management through simulations and data driven analytics. But they overlooked executing manufacturing processes through DTs from virtual space. This dissertation identifies that DTs can be made more productive if they engage directly in direct execution of manufacturing operations besides monitoring. Towards this novel approach, this dissertation proposes a new operable DT model of CPMC that inherits the features of direct monitoring and operations from cloud. This research envisages and opens the door for future manufacturing systems where resources are developed as cloud-based DTs for remote and distributed manufacturing. Proposed concepts and visions of DTs have spawned the following fundamental researches. This dissertation proposes a novel concept of DT based Virtual Production Lines (VPL) in CPMC in 2019. It presents a design of a service-oriented architecture of DTs that virtualizes physical manufacturing resources in CPMC. Proposed DT architecture offers a more compact and integral service-oriented virtual representations of manufacturing resources. To re-configure a VPL, one requirement is to establish DT-to-DT collaborations in manufacturing clouds, which replicates to concurrent resource-to-resource collaborations in shop floors. Satisfying the above requirements, this research designs a novel framework to easily re-configure, monitor and operate VPLs using DTs of CPMC. CPMC publishes individual web services for machining tools, which is a traditional approach in the domain of service computing. But this approach overcrowds service registry databases. This dissertation introduces a novel fundamental service publication and discovery approach in 2020, OpenDT, which publishes DTs with collections of services. Experimental results show easier discovery and remote access of DTs while re-configuring VPLs. Proposed researches in this dissertation have received numerous citations both from industry and academia, clearly proving impacts of research contributions

Event-driven industrial robot control architecture for the Adept V+ platform

Modern industrial robotic systems are highly interconnected. They operate in a distributed environment and communicate with sensors, computer vision systems, mechatronic devices, and computational components. On the fundamental level, communication and coordination between all parties in such distributed system are characterized by discrete event behavior. The latter is largely attributed to the specifics of communication over the network, which, in terms, facilitates asynchronous programming and explicit event handling. In addition, on the conceptual level, events are an important building block for realizing reactivity and coordination. Eventdriven architecture has manifested its effectiveness for building loosely-coupled systems based on publish-subscribe middleware, either general-purpose or robotic-oriented. Despite all the advances in middleware, industrial robots remain difficult to program in context of distributed systems, to a large extent due to the limitation of the native robot platforms. This paper proposes an architecture for flexible event-based control of industrial robots based on the Adept V+ platform. The architecture is based on the robot controller providing a TCP/IP server and a collection of robot skills, and a high-level control module deployed to a dedicated computing device. The control module possesses bidirectional communication with the robot controller and publish/subscribe messaging with external systems. It is programmed in asynchronous style using pyadept, a Python library based on Python coroutines, AsyncIO event loop and ZeroMQ middleware. The proposed solution facilitates integration of Adept robots into distributed environments and building more flexible robotic solutions with eventbased logic

NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures

Artificial cognitive control system based on the shared circuits model of sociocognitive capacities. A first approach

sharedcircuitmodels is presented in this work. The sharedcircuitsmodelapproach of sociocognitivecapacities recently proposed by Hurley in The sharedcircuitsmodel (SCM): how control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation, deliberation, and mindreading. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31(1) (2008) 1–22 is enriched and improved in this work. A five-layer computational architecture for designing artificialcognitivecontrolsystems is proposed on the basis of a modified sharedcircuitsmodel for emulating sociocognitive experiences such as imitation, deliberation, and mindreading. In order to show the enormous potential of this approach, a simplified implementation is applied to a case study. An artificialcognitivecontrolsystem is applied for controlling force in a manufacturing process that demonstrates the suitability of the suggested approac