Digital Twin Simulation for Automated Aerobridge Docking System

In this study, a Digital Twin simulation is developed for the automatic docking of an aerobridge to an aircraft by combining the Unity game engine and MATLAB/SIMULINK. Physical objects, like aircraft and surrounding vehicles, and the multi-dimensional simulations of the environment are built by Unity. The dynamics and control of the aerobridge are solved by MATLAB/SIMULINK. The simulated aerobridge is updated by feedback control not only with its control variables calculated by MATLAB/SIMULINK but also with the pose of the target aircraft and interaction from the environment simulated by Unity. The data exchange with TCP/IP communication between Unity and MATLAB enables this control loop. With the Digital Twin simulation system, a docking process for an E-class aircraft was executed. The pose changes of the aerobridge are extracted and compared for the docking process, and the result verifies the feasibility of the developed simulation system.