Augmented Perception: Empowering Flexible Manufacturing Systems through the Digital Twin - A Novel Approach

Abstract

In the context of the Industry of the Future, man-ufacturing environments must be flexible and reconfigurable to continuously adapt to customers' personalized demands and changes in the manufacturing processes. This adaptation involves the reconfiguration of the layout and the integration of new systems into the environment: production lines, manufacturing machines, robots, etc. This integration must occur seamlessly within the manufacturing processes to maintain consistent pro-duction rates. Currently, there are two options: simulation, which might not fully encompass all parameters of a real scenario; and intervention in the physical system, which requires a production pause and may not guarantee the anticipated benefits of these changes. To address this issue, this article proposes to model, integrate and evaluate a new concept entitled augmented perception, which bridges the real and the virtual to handle new production situations. The evaluation is done through a use case conducted in a simulated environment involving the Tiago++ robot: Tiago++ moves from point A to B and encounters a reconfiguration of the environment by adding an obstacle on its trajectory. Three experiments have been conducted: the first deals with Tiago++ navigation without any reconfiguration of the environment; the second considers the reconfiguration of the environment and the integration of the obstacle in the initial path of the robot without spreading this information to Tiago++'s navigation stack; the last refers to the augmented perception, which involves the digital model of the environment in which this virtual obstacle is integrated and pushed into the digital twin. Then this data is spread as contextual information coming from the digital twin to the robot before navigation occurs. Results are promising and strengthen the relevance of the augmented perception approach for robot navigation facing environment reconfiguration.