Augmented Reality Authoring of Digital Twins: Design, Implementation and Evaluation in an Industry 4.0 Context

Abstract

This paper deals with Digital Twins (DTs) for Industry 4.0 factories, and their implementation in the context of a reconfigurable factory. This context implies a modification of the layout of the workstations during production, and thus requires a live update of the digital twins according to these modifications. We needed this update done by the operators directly on the workstations using an AR authoring tool. A literature review helped us to determine the criteria that a tool should fulfill in order to achieve this goal. The most important criteria are that the tool should be suitable for use by operators not trained in AR, that the learning curve should be short, and that it should be usable in a reconfigurable factory context. We created a DT containing all the necessary factory data and 3D models of the workstation interaction zones of a real assembly line. We then developed a tool enabling operators to match the DTs with their physical twin (PT) in AR, as well as to update their position in case of a reconfiguration. The experimentation we carried out confirms our analysis and shows us that it is possible to deploy a DT in a factory quite simply if the positioning of the DTs is done by direct manipulation (the 3D objects are co-located with the operator’s hand) with the help of an AR display device.

TwinXR: Method for using digital twin descriptions in industrial eXtended reality applications

“…Meanwhile, DTs bring with them a rich amount of data, which serves as the foundation for creating digital content in XR interfaces (Ma et al, 2019). Industrial solutions combining the technologies of DT and XR have been proposed in several research works: Begout et al (2022) implemented a DT in the context of a reconfigurable factory with the help of an AR authoring tool; Podder et al (2022) leveraged a DT and its models in VR to enhance the learning experience and productivity of energy efficiency construction workers; Weistroffer et al (2022) proposed a framework to evaluate a cobotic workstation, by simulating a physics-based DT and using XR to display the DT and its associated data. Besides, our previous research explored the DT-XR combination by creating XR interfaces for a DT-based overhead crane: Tu et al (2021) implemented a Mixed Reality interface for on-site crane operation, while Yang et al (2022) proposed an XR development framework with crane virtual training and remote monitoring use cases.…”