A comparative study of time-related performance: COBOT with industrial robots using digital twin robotic cells
- International Robotics & Automation Journal
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Frederico Garavati Fioretti, Paulo Bueno Santos, Marcelo Campos Rebouças, Julio Cesar de Almeida Freitas, Rogério Adas
Pereira Vitalli
Abstract
In the context of the industry 4.0, defined by highly personalized processes, there’s a
rising interest of technologies related to the extraction of data of the process in real time to
better decide future actions i.e. define more efficient and productive configurations of the
industrial plant. From this, Cyber-physical systems such as digital twins are the most suited
technology to follow the process performance through data and reliably validate different
outcomes from simulations. Furthermore, COBOTs that can adapt to the environment
are ideal to deal with such changing demands which have to work alongside industrial
robots. Therefore, this study aims to use the digital twin capabilities of data extraction
and simulation from the FANUC’s robot simulator software to validate the performance
of industrial and collaborative robots in order to offer insights to better apply each type of
robot. It was used a robotic cell with the robot PRBT 6 as a reference to make 2 digital twins
of the cell with 2 different robot models, one collaborative and one industrial. Two digital
twins were made using ROBOGUIDE simulator, version 9.4 for the COBOT and version
9.1 for the industrial robot. It’s presented the method used to build the digital twin of the
robotic cell and the results show that the cycle time of the COBOT’s cell is significantly
higher than the industrial one but has higher flexibility.
Keywords
digital twin, simulator, industrial robot, COBOT, ROBOGUIDE, lead time
