Desenvolvimento de gêmeo digital suportado por instrumentação em um protótipo de sistema flexível de manufatura

Abstract

The Digital Twin (DT) is a technology with potential for applications based on Industry 4.0, as it allows real-time monitoring of production processes, prevention of failures, improvements in production ef iciency and assistance to decision making. One of the definitions of DT involves a physical environment, a virtual environment, and bidirectional communication between them, which allows virtual reproductions to be synchronized with competing processes in the physical system. Physical system must be instrumented with transducers to support the simulation promoted by DT. Therefore, the present study considered the application of a DT to a prototype of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) composed of a conveyor belt and a robotic manipulator with 6 degrees of freedom. The objective of this study was to apply the concept of DT to simulate manipulation tasks based on information acquired by the transducers responsible for recognizing and locating objects present on the conveyor belt. The CAx Creo Parametric®️ and 3DS MAX®️ softwares aided the development of the FMS virtual geometric model. The merge of function from Unity 3D®️ and Visual Studio®️ softwares, configured to implement routines written in the C# programming language, allowed the simulation of manipulator movements. These movements was implemented using inverse kinematics defined by the algebraic method. The prototype's physical system was developed with the aid of LabVIEW®️ software and it was instrumented with a webcam. A Local Area Network (LAN) was used for the communication between physical and virtual systems. The movement routines made it possible to simulate operations in the virtual model based on inverse kinematics supported by a parametric equation. LAN communication, with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) associated with an internet protocol (IP) version 4, allowed the activation of the simulation based on real data acquired by the transducer. Furthermore, the UDP communication protocol allowed communication between LabVIEW and Unity 3D softwares without loss of information. This communication required an mean time of 1 ms for information transfer.