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Collaborative robots are becoming part of intelligent automation systems in modern industry. Development and control of such systems differs from traditional automation methods and consequently leads to new challenges. Thankfully, Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a communication platform and a vast variety of tools and utilities that can aid that development. However, it is hard to use ROS in large-scale automation systems due to communication issues in a distributed setup, hence the development of ROS2. In this paper, a ROS2 based communication architecture is presented together with an industrial use-case of a collaborative and intelligent automation system.Since the incarnation of ROS in 2007 [3] by Willow Garage, the number of ROS users has seen a major increase with more than 16 million total downloads in the year 2018 [4]. Currently, ROS2 [5] is being developed, where the communication layer is based on Data Distribution Service (DDS) [6] to enable large scale distributed control architectures. As it is presented in this paper, this improvement paves the way for use of ROS2-based architectures in real-world industrial automation systems.Since ROS2 is behind ROS when it comes to the number of packages and active developers, communication bridges are used to pass messages between ROS and ROS2. These bridges allow the community to utilize strengths of both ROS and ROS2 in the same system, i.e. to have an extensive set of developed packages and at the same time have a robust way to communicate between machines. This is crucial in modern industry because it enables robust integration of state-of-the-art tools and algorithms necessary for control in collaborative and intelligent automation systems. Since these large-scale automation systems are usually distributed in nature, they require a well structured and reliable communication architecture. Therefore, this paper presents variations of a ROS2 based communication architecture with these traits.While enabling integration and communication is greatly beneficial, it is just one part of the challenge. The overall control architecture also needs to plan and coordinate all actions of robots, humans and other devices as well as to keep track of everything. Mixed human-machine industrial environments where operations are carried out either collaboratively, coactively or individually, demand non-traditional control strategies. A few ROS based frameworks that try to handle these control strategies are ROSPlan [7], SkiROS [8], eTaSL/eTC [9] and CoSTAR [10]. These frameworks are however mainly focused on single robot systems and as such lack the infrastructure to support large scale automation systems. Intelligent and collaborative systems often comprise of several robots, machines, smart tools, human-machine interfaces, cameras, safety sensors, etc.A use-case in this paper illustrates the challenges of achieving flexible automation in an industrial setup and highlights the need to use ROS due to great integration with smart devices and algorithms. A brief overview ...

In this paper, an approach to incorporate a digital twin for legacy production systems is presented. Hardware-inthe-loop setups are routinely used by manufacturing companies to carry out virtual commissioning. However, manufacturing companies having online legacy production systems are still struggling to incorporate a digital twin due to the absence of verified and validated simulation models. Companies that use virtual commissioning as a part of their engineering tool chain, usually perform offline verification of the simulation model. This approach is typically based on visual inspection and is a tedious task as each aspect of the model has to be visually validated. For legacy systems, only assessing the behavior visually in the absence of updated documents can result in an incorrect simulation model, i.e. simulating incorrect behavior with respect to the specification. Due to this, such simulation models cannot be incorporated in the engineering tool chain, as the simulated results can lead to improper decisions and can even cause equipment damage. This paper presents a platform and an approach, based on model-based testing, that is a first step for manufacturing companies to incorporate a validated simulation model for existing online production systems that will serve as a digital twin.

Virtual commissioning (VC) is a method used to virtually visualize and test production systems, control logic and material flows. The focus of this paper is to further extend this concept using Virtual Reality (VR). The introduction of VR in VC enhances the concept by adding a more realistic visualization and movement tracking which extends the possibilities of its validation. The changes to the validation aspect are mainly due to the fact that it is now possible to interact with the running virtual production in a realistic and intuitive way. The interaction gives designers and operators a new possibility to go from being observers to actors in the design phase. They are now able to validate the production system, test security protocols and validate the human interaction with the system, using VR.

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