Digital Twin and HMI for collaborative autonomous mobile robots in flexible logistics

Digital Twin and HMI for collaborative autonomous mobile robots in flexible logistics. The digital transformation is pervading our society, boosted by the development of new technologies and a lot of companies are undergoing radical changes, which apply both to products and processes, in order to comply with the requirements that the competition imposes. This thesis work has been drawn up during a collaboration for a project, whose specialization area is the smart factory, with Reply S.p.A. The title of this project is ICOSAF (Integrated COllaborative Systems for smArt Factory) and its leader is CRF (Centro Ricerche Fiat). In particular, its aim is to develop and integrate technologies for collaborative workspaces following the principles of industry 4.0 (interconnected automation) and industry 5.0, which is about humanization and re-use of resources. In the context of industry 4.0 the concept of Digital Twin is becoming more and more important. A Digital Twin is indeed an evolving way of simulating the historical and current behavior of a physical machine or a production process as an exact replica of the model it reproduces, since it is based on the same data, functionalities and communication interfaces, with the aim of optimizing it, validating it, monitoring it and hence preventing (taking actions against it) or reducing the risk of breakages, problems or errors that could occur. A simulated copy of the ICOSAF Use Case C has been implemented in order to have something to be integrated with the HMI that needed to be developed, too. Furthermore, as explained before, virtual environment carries a variety of potentialities to be exploited and hence it has been used in a predictive fashion: since production processes need to be performing, efficient, controlled and fast, this technology was used also to generate forecasts about possible errors or wastes, leading to higher performances and profit margin. As for the HMI, it is a layer between the user and the machine, process, device or system being controlled. It can be thought of as an interface which permits to interact with the objects listed before. HMIs are widely used in companies as advanced interfaces to control machines or systems, but industries which make use of this kind of system, exploits them for different reasons. Human Machine Interfaces, in fact, can display meaningful data, track production processes, time and machines consumptions in terms of energy, monitor machines input and outputs and so on. First of all, a brief analysis about the kind of device to be used as HMI has been conducted and this led to the result that for on field operators smart watches are the best choice, while for remote operators, tablets and PCs still represent the best selection. The required HMI has been then implemented in the form of a cross-platform web application, able to interact with the Digital Twin and with the robot/s simulated in it. From the integration of the developed systems, some interesting insights have been produced. It was possible, in fact, not only to verify that the solution proposed by ICOSAF was 1 actually correct, but to make some predictive considerations about possible future implementations of the same system in order to optimize it and pave the way for further improvements.