Physical and Virtual Robotic Cells in Industry 4.0 Towards Industry 5.0: An XR-Based Conceptual Framework

Abstract

The Digital Twin (DT) in the manufacturing domain is already the everyday tool for visualizing the various industrial systems, equipment, and produced products. When designing a new manufacturing unit or enlarging an existing factory, it is important to do so without affecting the manufacturing process flow itself. There are opportunities through simulation and digital manufacturing to plan and optimize this design process. Within usage of the actual physical machinery data gathered from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors and feeding to the DT, optimizing the layout can be done more precisely and effectively. However, there is no way to test the potential equipment simultaneously with the physical one in real-time. This paper aims to propose a Mixed Reality (MR) based system framework and toolkit, which will enable physical industrial robots to interact with virtual equipment and other virtual robots. This way, via Virtual Reality (VR), it will be possible to design a system layout. Furthermore, via the Augmented Reality (AR) view, it will be possible to simulate the interaction between multiple robots by enhancing the possibilities of the physical environment and using the new precise scale real-time design method.