Industrial collaborative robot Digital Twin integration and control using Robot Operating System

Standardized and universal solutions for industrial robot integration are increasingly urgent requirements for companies looking for machine interconnectivity, and flexibility in creating tailor made manufacturing systems. These solutions must be supported by modular and open-source components able to easily integrate new control methods and advanced Extended Reality (XR) interfaces. Robot Operating System (ROS) has proven to be a reliable standard for industrial robot integration. ROS compatibility software is provided by many producers and allows for the implementation of modular control units by unifying development practices along the same libraries and methods. Digital Twins (DT) of industrial equipment and processes offer a solid base to develop innovative digital tools relying on synchronization between physical and digital entities and to easily setup intuitive XR interfaces for teleoperation and programming. This work presents the integration of the OMRON TM5-9000 collaborative industrial robot into the IVAR laboratory DT system at Tallinn University of Technology. By using Unity3D game engine and developing a ROS package for the specific machine, the digital model of the collaborative robot is integrated into the existing twin. Synchronization with the real counterpart is provided by MQTT protocol while a robot user interface is developed in Unity and provides robot joints visualization and remote control.