Digital Twins for Robot Systems in Manufacturing

The increasing need for industrial automationAutomation is driving the adoption of robotics, with new developments such as human–robot collaborationHuman robot collaboration through autonomous mobile robots and collaborative robotic arms. While automationAutomation improves product quality and working conditions and lowers manufacturing costs, it can also limit manufacturing adaptability. Therefore, when integrating robots in manufacturing, there is a pressing need to simplify the methods to develop, install, reconfigure, and operate robot systems to achieve greater adaptability. This is where the concept of Digital Twin, which replicates the behavior of a complex system in a virtual environment for analysis and optimization, comes into play. In robotics, the Digital Twin technology is expected to address the challenges associated with designing, testing, commissioningCommissioning, and reconfigurationsReconfiguration. This requires a Digital Twin to accurately represent various dimensions of a robotic system under production variables. This study characterizes the components of a robot system that need to be modeled in a Digital Twin to create a trustworthy virtual replica of a physical robot system. A Digital Twin of this kind can be utilized throughout the lifecycleLifecycle of the physical robot installation across various use cases.