Interactive digital twin of a cleanroom robot

The essence

Together with our partners Orange and Stäubli, we created a digital twin of Stäubli’s industrial robot arm, the TX2-60L. The digital twin can be visualized with the HoloLens and mimics the movements of the robot in real-time. Moreover, it displays IoT data, sends commands to the robot and facilitates remote support. All this allows for controlling the robot in every aspect, without the need for physical presence in the cleanroom.

The challenge

Remotely control robotics

Modern-day factories and laboratories are filled with robotics, such as robot arms automating industrial processes. But what if something goes wrong? Maintenance or even inspection might be problematic; access might be subject to stringent security requirements, the robot arm might be in a clean room, travel time for technicians might be high, and so on.

What if all this could be done remotely, including being able to follow the exact movements, without having to compromise? This is the journey we set out on together with our partners, Orange and Stäubli.

The Solution

We created a digital twin of a cleanroom robot (in this case the TX2-60L) to be used in combination with the HoloLens 2. The digital twin represents a full 3D visualization of the TX2-60L and has the following properties:

1. Allow assessing the status of the robot arm, including temperatures, operating mode, safety status, errors, messages, and more – so problems can be diagnosed remotely.
2. Allow following real-world physical movements of the robot arm in real time – so remote technicians can follow what the robot is doing (and no streaming video through a camera!).
3. Allow sending commands back to the robot arm – so remote technicians can ensure safety (lower movement velocity, lock movement, …) and help fix the problem.
4. Facilitate remote support without requiring the robot arm to be reachable over the public internet – many industries, such as pharma, have tight security in place and prefer not to open their network to the public internet any further than necessary.

Creating the possibility to access all this information remotely saves manufacturing plants tons of time and money. It eliminates the need for physical presence in the cleanroom, which means no unnecessary disinfection of the room and the person entering the room.

But even regardless of the cleanroom environment, we strongly see added value for the digital twin we developed. It allows manufacturers to monitor an entire production line from a distance.

Our approach

Extract information from the robot arm

The first problem that came to mind when designing the solution was: how are we going to extract information from the robot arm, such as its status? Can it even report this kind of information? Well, yes! The technical setup is thus fare interesting that we decided to dedicate a blog post to it. Read all about the hardware setup, our solution design and more.