Virtual reality in manufacturing: immersive and collaborative artificial-reality in design of human-robot workspace

Abstract

Over the past years the concept of human centred automation has received a lot of attention to achieve hybrid automation. A form of hybrid automation is taking benefit from the synergistic effect of human-robot collaboration. When used in assembly, the requirement of flexibility, adaptability and safety makes the design and redesign of human-robot collaborative (HRC) systems a complex and prone to error process. The use of time-based continuous simulations can offer safe virtual space for testing and validation thus easing the design of complex HRC systems. However, conventional simulations don't allow to experience the future production system as an end-user in an immersive environment. This paper explores the technological development in VR for design of human-centered production systems and develop a unified framework to combine human-robot simulation with VR. The simulation as an event-driven simulation helped in estimating the humanrobot cycle times, developing process plan, layout optimization and robot control program. The same simulation is used in VR to interact with the production equipment and particularly with the robot. Additionally, AWS Sumerian environment is used to create a virtual robot to assist VR user in the design process.

Digital Twin: Enabling Technologies, Challenges and Open Research

“…The other combines the physical task and the virtual task to create a real-time, skills-based robotic production line accurately allocating a task to the human or robot based on the optimum production they could respectively achieve [1]. Both papers, through the use of case studies, identify the benefits of digitalisation, but both also cite the challenges with seamless integration, something needed for the effective running of an assembly line and Digital Twins [2] [1] [89].…”

Reconfiguring and ramping-up ventilator production in the face of COVID-19: Can robots help?

“…Unusual collaborations are being forged between governments, manufacturers of similar as well as different products to adapt, ramp-up and reconfigure to supply medical ventilators. The resilience and changeability maybe achieved through emerging digital technologies [ 41 , 77 , 78 ]. Efforts are being made globally by many research communities to fulfil the demand of ventilators as well as other personal protective equipment (PPEs).…”

“…Industrial automation of physical tasks is greatly driven by robots in today’s manufacturing [ 40 ]. However, robots remain too inflexible [ 38 ] and are impractical when they need to coexist with humans [ 41 ]. It takes weeks to integrate a robot in a production system; with little to no possibility of any modifications without considerable efforts.…”

Characteristics of changeable systems across value chains

“…Systematic model-driven approaches to enabling competitive design and change capability in manufacturing enterprises exist Masood and Weston, 2012), covering various production management and modelling levels with views of product dynamics, customer order decoupling points, work dynamic, performance metrics, enterprise modelling (static) and simulation modelling. A recent example is related to digital twin based simulations of collaborative robots for reconfiguring existing factories and ramping-up production of medical ventilators in the face of COVID-19 pandemic while following social distancing rules (Malik et al 2020a;Malik et al 2020b).…”

“…Vernadat et al (2018) highlighted recent advances and new perspectives of information systems and knowledge management in industrial engineering, which include three major thrusts in production research. First thrust is on Industry 4.0 technologies for the factories of the future including Small and Medium Enterprises (Masood and Sonntag 2020), which includes technologies like augmented reality (Egger and Masood 2020;Masood and Egger 2019;Masood and Egger 2020), immersive and collaborative artificial-reality in design of human-robot workspaces (Malik, Masood, and Bilberg 2020a;Malik, Masood, and Kousar 2020b;Malik, Masood, and Kousar 2020c). Second thrust is on creating Sˆ3 enterprises based on sensing, smart and sustainability capabilities while third thrust is on cloud manufacturing which is linked to networked organisations (Rashid et al 2018;Vernadat et al 2018).…”