Multi-Robot Collaborative Flexible Manufacturing and Digital Twin System Design of Circuit Breakers

Abstract

Circuit breakers (CBs) are mainly designed to interrupt current flow when faults are detected and have been widely used in industrial applications. The existing CBs manufacturing method is semi-automatic and requires a lot of labor. To realize flexible manufacturing, a multi-robot cooperative CBs flexible manufacturing system (CBFMS) is presented in this study. Aiming at the efficiency of the multi-robot cooperative CBFMS key units, a two-arm cooperation robot approach is proposed. The reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to optimize the manufacturing trajectory of the two-arm cooperation robot. To build and optimize the multi-robot cooperative CBFMS, a digital twin (DT) system describing all physical properties of the physical manufacturing plant is constructed for simulation. In the developed DT system, a kinematic control model of the collaboration robot is established. A real-time display of the robot’s trajectory, manufacturing status, and process manufacturing is provided by the data interaction with the physical cell flow between the units. Following this design, a synchronous mapping between the flexible manufacturing DT system of the CBs and the physical workshop is realized, which enables real-time monitoring and management of the physical production line. The experiments’ results show that the manufacturing efficiency, compared with traditional CBs production, is improved by 22%. Moreover, the multi-robot cooperative CBFMS can make process changes according to the production requirements, which can improve the stability of production.