Benchmarking Sim2Real Gap: High-fidelity Digital Twinning of Agile Manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of high-fidelity digital twins in agile manufacturing, focusing on sim-to-real transfer techniques like domain adaptation to enhance robotic automation and process optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive benchmarking framework for Sim2Real gap assessment in digital twin applications within agile manufacturing contexts.

Findings

Digital twins improve process optimization and predictive maintenance.

Advanced transfer techniques enhance sim-to-real policy transfer.

Benchmark metrics effectively evaluate digital twin performance.

Abstract

As the manufacturing industry shifts from mass production to mass customization, there is a growing emphasis on adopting agile, resilient, and human-centric methodologies in line with the directives of Industry 5.0. Central to this transformation is the deployment of digital twins, a technology that digitally replicates manufacturing assets to enable enhanced process optimization, predictive maintenance, synthetic data generation, and accelerated customization and prototyping. This chapter delves into the technologies underpinning the creation of digital twins specifically tailored to agile manufacturing scenarios within the realm of robotic automation. It explores the transfer of trained policies and process optimizations from simulated settings to real-world applications through advanced techniques such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, curriculum learning, and model-based system identification. The chapter also examines various industrial manufacturing automation scenarios, including bin-picking, part inspection, and product assembly, under Sim2Real conditions. The performance of digital twin technologies in these scenarios is evaluated using practical metrics including data latency, adaptation rate, simulation fidelity among others reported, providing a comprehensive assessment of their efficacy and potential impact on modern manufacturing processes.