Digital Twin of a 5-Bar Parallel Manipulator with Singularity Avoidance

Digital twin is one of emerging components of Industry 4.0 and it is not so common in the literature. In this project, digital twin of a 5-bar parallel manipulator is modeled. These are very much useful for robotics process automation. This digital twin encompasses the closed-loop constraints of the parallel manipulator, joint limits of the passive joints and the mass and inertia properties of its physical twin and loT communication is established between the physical and digital twins. The digital twin is built on SIMSCAPE multi-body platform. Singularity is the most important aspect of a parallel manipulator to be addressed. In the physical twin, there is an extra actuator provided to take the manipulator outside of singularity configuration. This feature is also included in the digital twin. A Jacobian block is incorporated in the digital twin which calculates the determinant of both forward and inverse Jacobian matrices. When anyone of the Jacobian matrices goes to zero, then the base actuator of the digital twin moves and takes the manipulator outside the singularity configuration. Another feature of the digital twin is lOT control by using ESP8266 module and a ESP32 module by which the data is transferred from the active joints of the physical model to the ThingSpeak cloud platform. This data is then transmitted to the Simscape model using ThingSpeak Input block in MATLAB Simscape.