Building a Cloud-Based Digital Twin for a Robotic Assembly System

Abstract

Abstract The potential of Digital Twin (DT) technology to revolutionize industry by enabling virtual simulations of physical systems in real-time has garnered significant attention in recent years. DTs have been widely applied in the manufacturing field to solve various problems, such as shopfloor resource optimization, layout design, commissioning, monitoring, and supervisory control. However, current DT research works are highly conceptual, and how to develop a DT for a legacy system needs more practical understanding. To address the challenge, this paper develops a cloud-based pipeline for building a digital twin of a robotic assembly system. The proposed pipeline is featured by cloud infrastructures, real-time bi-directional monitoring and control, and web-based DT. The use of cloud infrastructure and WebGL helps to increase remote accessibility, enabling real-time visualization of the DT through web environments. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed pipeline, a proof-of-concept DT of a robotic assembly system with over 2000 components was implemented with demonstrated scenes of online order submission, job status monitoring, exception handling, and remote feedback control. Overall, the proposed cloud-based DT pipeline could provide a practical and efficient solution for integrating DT technology into real-world cyber-physical systems. Future works and limitations are also discussed in the end.