Crossing Real and Virtual: Pepper Robot as an Interactive Digital Twin

This paper proposes a practical framework for implementing a Digital Twin (DT) application in Unity Engine, aimed at simulating the Softbank Pepper robot for testing interactive tasks in the RoboCup@Home ( https://www.robocup.org/ ) competition using virtual reality. The proposed framework employs a versatile robotic middleware integrating open-source ZeroMQ (ZMQ) websocket and Qi API, which enables researchers to implement the framework in various simulations. This paper also provides a short insight into setting up the DT framework in Unity Engine to enable real-time communication between the virtual and physical robot. The framework can be used by future researchers to simulate Pepper robots in diverse 3D game engines for testing interactive tasks.