Towards Reconfigurable Cyber-Physical-Human Systems: Leveraging Mixed Reality and Digital Twins to integrate Human Operations

Abstract

The agility to swiftly and efficiently reconfigure manufacturing systems is crucial in today’s rapidly evolving market demands. Traditional recon-figuration operations often fall short, presenting non-intuitive and error-prone tasks for human operators, without the aid of systematic approaches or supportive technologies. This gap not only complicates the reconfiguration process but also significantly increases the risk of errors. In response, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Mixed Reality and Digital Twins within Cyber-Physical Systems to address these challenges. This enhances the human element in manufacturing reconfigurations by facilitating intuitive trajectory planning for robot (re)programming and comprehensive documentation of physical processes, including human operations. The design and implementation of the approach aim to significantly enhance manufacturing reconfigurations by reducing downtime, complexity, and human error. Further, the paper outlines directions for future work, including comprehensive system validation within a Cyber-Physical-Human manufacturing system, emphasizing the critical role of human operators in the reconfiguration process and the potential for technology to address traditional shortcomings.