Abstract
Digital twin technology empowers the digital transformation of the industrial world with an increasing amount of data, which meanwhile creates a challenging context for designing a human–machine interface (HMI) for operating machines. This work aims at creating an HMI for digital twin based services. With an industrial crane platform as a case study, we presented a mixed reality (MR) application running on a Microsoft HoloLens 1 device. The application, consisting of visualization, interaction, communication, and registration modules, allowed crane operators to both monitor the crane status and control its movement through interactive holograms and bi-directional data communication, with enhanced mobility thanks to spatial registration and tracking of the MR environment. The prototype was quantitatively evaluated regarding the control accuracy in 20 measurements following a step-by-step protocol that we defined to standardize the measurement procedure. The results suggested that the differences between the target and actual positions were within the 10 cm range in three dimensions, which were considered sufficiently small regarding the typical crane operation use case of logistics purposes and could be improved with the adoption of robust registration and tracking techniques in our future work.
Highlights
Nowadays, digitalization is fundamentally and sustainably transforming the industrial world
The holograms, including the bounding box around the image target and the selected targets, at times presented location shifting during the registration step or when manually moving the crane in a unit measurement
The issues arose during the registration step between the bounding box and the image target, as well as when manually moving the crane between the target holograms and the crane hook
Summary
Digitalization is fundamentally and sustainably transforming the industrial world. The industrial production process is moving towards “Industry 4.0” [1], which is characterized by introducing digital twins, the digital representations of the physical assets, processes, or systems [2]. Digital twins could empower the whole product life cycle from machine design to development and optimization until maintenance with high flexibility and efficiency [3]. The increasing amount of digital twin data within different formats and from different resources creates a challenging context for human–machine interface (HMI) design [4]. Highly supportive HMIs used for operating machines and managing services are severely lacking. This work, aims at exploring the possibility of creating an HMI for digital twin systems, leveraging the mixed reality technology to operate a digital twin based industrial crane
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