Sustainable and flexible industrial human machine interfaces to support adaptable applications in the Industry 4.0 paradigm

Abstract

The Industry 4.0 paradigm introduced several technologies in the industrial manufacturing landscape, highlighting the Cyber Physical Systems, Internet of Things and Visual Computing as some of the key enabling technologies. The fast paced evolution of the technology has to be reflected in the common ground between the machines and the operators. The introduction of advanced, flexible and adaptable Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) will empower the operators with information and custom tools to be more productive in a safer way. This work presents totally functional hardware and a novel software architecture to build flexible advanced HMI interfaces that will provide adaptable and useful information to the operator of the machines. Industrial protocols are used to receive real-time data. A USB camera can be plugged to enable the utilisation of Computer Vision algorithms. A touch display shows adaptable interfaces composed of (a) 3D interactive graphics, (b) texts and 2D images, (c) the camera feed and (d) user interface controls to enable the interaction with the operators. The results present three use cases: (a) an HMI customised for 3D printers, (b) real-time motor control from the HMI and (c) a digital twin of a robotic arm receiving real-time data from the actual robotic arm. This work present data regarding consumption of the hardware for each use case under different work-load.