Building Safer Robots: From Simulation to Hardware Deployment

Robots represent a pervasive technology foreseen to have an integral role in our societies, across different domains, from elderly care to agricultural solutions. Therefore, it is crucial that their behaviour is thoroughly tested, to provide guarantees as to their intended safe operation around humans, other robots, equipment, and environment. Such testing should be performed throughout the different development stages, and is associated with several challenges that relate to cost, time, and resource management. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a Digital Twin (DT) enabled approach that can be used in various development stages of robots, from pure simulation, to gradual introduction of hardware, to a complete robot with its DT. Additionally, it is possible to apply fault-injection at the interface level of the components on the DT side, while maintaining a best effort real-time communication between the former and the coupled hardware. We showcase the utility of the proposed approach through three proof of concept scenarios for a safety monitoring component of the system, with simulated faults at the component level, and on the data coming to the digital twin.