Industrial collaborative robot Digital Twin integration and control using Robot Operating System

Standardized and universal solutions for industrial robot integration are increasingly urgent requirements for companies looking for machine interconnectivity, and flexibility in creating tailor made manufacturing systems. These solutions must be supported by modular and open-source components able to easily integrate new control methods and advanced Extended Reality (XR) interfaces. Robot Operating System (ROS) has proven to be a reliable standard for industrial robot integration. ROS compatibility software is provided by many producers and allows for the implementation of modular control units by unifying development practices along the same libraries and methods. Digital Twins (DT) of industrial equipment and processes offer a solid base to develop innovative digital tools relying on synchronization between physical and digital entities and to easily setup intuitive XR interfaces for teleoperation and programming. This work presents the integration of the OMRON TM5-9000 collaborative industrial robot into the IVAR laboratory DT system at Tallinn University of Technology. By using Unity3D game engine and developing a ROS package for the specific machine, the digital model of the collaborative robot is integrated into the existing twin. Synchronization with the real counterpart is provided by MQTT protocol while a robot user interface is developed in Unity and provides robot joints visualization and remote control

Parametric Digital Twin of autonomous electric vehicle transmission

Variable applications and methodologies are used in the Digital Twin technology. Digital Twin as a trending technology is also a general topic of many industry-oriented research projects. To develop and implement a novel technology, a detailed study of any single part of a system is required. This paper presents a development case study of the parametric Digital Twin of autonomous electric vehicle transmission. Digital Twin combines the advantages of software models and real equipment to reduce total test runs and safe maintenance. The primary duty of the Digital Twin is to allow complete synchronization and connectivity between virtual and real entities. The paper presents a detailed structural description of the virtual entity that considers the parametrization of the transmission