An Intelligent Edge-based Digital Twin for Robotics

Digital Twin is one of the use cases targeted by the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), which, through the digitalization of the robotic systems, will enable enhanced automation and remote controlling capabilities. Building upon this concept, this work proposes a solution for an Edge-based Digital Twin for robotics, which leverages on the cloud-to-things continuum to offload computation and intelligence from the robots to the network. This imposes stringent requirements over the communication technologies which are fulfilled by relying on 5G. This solution is implemented in an E2E scenario combining the cloud-to-things continuum, 5G connectivity and intelligence capabilities and validated through a set of experimental evaluations. Results show not only that offloading the robot’s functions to the edge is feasible when supported by the 5G connectivity, but also the benefits of introducing intelligence and automation.