A Digital Twin Demonstrator for Research and Teaching in Universities

Abstract

The importance of digitization in production and training was recognized and has found its way into many companies nowadays. Technologies such as IoT, rapid prototyping, and digital twins can be used to advantage in these fields. In order to show the numerous possibilities of such technologies, a digital twin demonstrator was built and extended to include virtual and augmented reality for control, data exchange, and data visualization. This demonstrator can be used for R&D topics as well as for teaching undergraduates and co-workers. A very flexible system configuration enables to adapt to many different tasks and can be easily reproduced. Future topics will be to exchange components, e.g., Python instead of MATLAB, alternatives to MQTT, etc., to increase the flexibility and check for the latency of the data connection via the internet. Research extended from the demonstrator is also presented in the paper to show how to use Node-RED installed Raspberry Pi to build an industrial IoT in a factory.