A Preliminary Study of a Cyber Physical System for Industry 4.0: Modelling and Co-Simulation of an AGV for Smart Factories

Abstract

In this research, a localization system for a particular Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV), namely a Laser Guided Vehicle (LGV), which takes advantage of RSSI data, is described. The vehicle, its sensors and the wireless sensor network are virtualized, in order to provide a software replica of that available in a real factory. A Co-Simulator, composed by two simulation environments, has been implemented: from one hand, Robot Operating System (ROS), the RVIZ and GAZEBO for modeling and simulating the virtual system, and from the other hand, COOJA for reproducing the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) behavior and RSSI signals. The virtualized LGV in ROS, together with its virtual sensors set, is integrated with the WSN in COOJA, so that localization can be performed by sensor fusion of odometric and RSSI data according to a Kalman Filter approach. The Co-simulator can be used to deploy path-tracking policies and test them before actual implementation in a Cyber Physical System (CPS) scenario.