Architecture and Implementation of High-Fidelity Digital Twins for Industrial Robots

Digital twin is an important technology emerging in recent years. Industrial robots are an important type of equipment for the manufacturing industry. Construction of digital twins for industrial robots is of great significance. Fidelity of digital twins of robots is important as it determines their usability in manufacturing. In order to enable transparent management and intelligent applications of industrial robots, this paper proposes an architecture and a method of building high-fidelity digital twins for robots. First, a high-fidelity model of industrial robots is proposed. Then, logical architecture and functional architecture of the high-fidelity digital twins of industrial robots are proposed. The logical architecture comprises physical robot, virtual robot as well as communication and interaction between them. The functional architecture consists of five layers, including equipment layer, transmission layer, digital twin layer, application layer, and industry layer. Finally, based on the model and architecture, and taking the SD3/500 industrial robot as an example, a digital twin system is developed, which implements functions of virtual-real synchronization, real-time monitoring, kinematic simulation, data visualization, and real-time finite element analysis. The digital twin system verifies the feasibility of the proposed model and architecture.