Towards Human-Robot Collaboration: An Industry 4.0 VR Platform with Clouds Under the Hood

Abstract

Safe and efficient Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is an essential feature of future Industry 4.0 production systems which requires sophisticated collision avoidance mechanisms with intense computation need. Digital twins provide a novel way to test the impact of different control decisions in a simulated virtual environment even in parallel. In addition, Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) applications can revolutionize future industry environments. Each component requires extreme computational power which can be provided by cloud platforms but at the cost of higher delay and jitter. Moreover, clouds bring a versatile set of novel techniques easing the life of both developers and operators. Can these applications be realized and operated on today’s systems? In this demonstration, we give answers to this question via real experiments.