Real-time simulation and virtual commissioning of a modular robot system with OPC UA

The aerospace industry has an ever-increasing demand for automation, in order to reduce costs and increase production capacity. High costs for commissioning and the use of systems specialized for specific tasks are some of the biggest challenges. Hence modular systems and methods for the virtual commissioning of such are required. We present a new solution for the virtual commissioning of modular systems including detailed physical behavior models. This approach combines the object-oriented multi-domain modeling language Modelica with real-time robot simulation, real-time visualization, contact dynamics and OPC UA technology. It enables the simulation of the system on multiple levels of detail, from the kinematics of the mobile platform to the programming of the robot with G-code up to the forces of the drill process in detail. Our use case is a mobile robot system performing drilling operations on a vertical tail plane shell of an airplane. The system consists of the modules platform, navigation, robot, precision, and drill. A central, high-level controller is used to orchestrate the processes of the modules both for the real and the virtual hardware. The exchangeability between real modules and their virtual counterparts becomes possible due to uniform OPC-UA-based interfaces.