A generic and modularized digital twin enabled human-robot collaboration

Recently, the manufacturing paradigm shifts from mass production to mass customization, which results in urgently demands for the development of intelligent, flexible and automatic manufacturing systems for handling complex manufacturing tasks with high efficiency. The use of collaborative robots, an essential enabling technology for developing human-robot collaboration (HRC), is on the rise for human-centric intelligent automation design. An effective virtual simulation platform, which can continuously simulate and evaluate HRC performance in different working scenarios, is lacking in developing an HRC system in a sophisticated industrial arena. This paper presents a generic and modularized digital twin enabled HRC framework based on the synergy effect of human, robotic and environment-related factors to provide a flexible, compatible, re-configurable solution to ease the implementation of HRC in the real world. The feasibility of the proposed framework is validated through the practical implementation of a food packaging job, which involves a human operator and an ABB robotic arm collaboratively working together, on an industrial shop