Design of a Data Collection System for Robot Digital Twins

The paper presents a software architecture designed for data gathering in robot digital twins (DT). This system acquires information and data from the industrial robot, the automated process performed by the robot, and the devices linked to the robot (such as conveyor belt, ASRS, and smart meters). The data retrieval is facilitated by an edge processing framework that includes the robot controller and IoT gateways. The software system comprises a data acquisition agent that is directly linked to the edge processing hardware, a local database for storing the acquired information, and a user interface that offers various data display possibilities. The DT software is designed to collect robot data in two modes: continually from the robot controller and the IoT gateways using specialized software tools provided by the robot manufacturer, and discretely from special program instructions through messages. Experiments with the DT data collection system are conducted for ABB IRC5 industrial robot controllers.