Reusage of Extended Digital Twins from Virtual Commissioning for Dynamics-Based Trajectory Planning in CNC Controlled Robotics

Industrial robots can be controlled by a CNC controller instead of the native robot controller. This approach provides several advantages, including robot operation synchronous with the machine tools and facilitated automation applications. However, CNC control of robots also has drawbacks compared to the robot controller: Its control technology is less advanced and implementing solutions through available interfaces is difficult due to the required expertise from different engineering domains. The primary novelty of this paper is to offer a solution for this by using digital twins (DT) from virtual commissioning (VC) with extended dynamic behaviour to improve the trajectory planning of CNC-based control. An interface between the DT platform and the CNC is developed to communicate acceleration limits based on the dynamic capabilities of the robot while the DT ensures an easily applicable method for different robot models. This method is validated in a VC simulation and on a real robot.