Do you know about digital twinis and digital mirrors?
Do you know about digital twins and digital mirrors?
Work done by: Carlos Prados
The development of reliable simulation systems is crucial; therefore, there is a high interest in digital twins. Robot platforms have a high cost due to their materials, sensors, and actuators. A simulation environment can avoid system damage while testing algorithms, reducing maintenance and testing time, wasted material, and costs. Furthermore, it is possible to vary the environmental conditions to perform tests in different situations. In general, a reliable virtual model of the system is required when working on large projects. Due to the simulation of complex systems, the testing time is considerably reduced, and in our case, it is possible to test the behavior of organisms with different arrangements and number of modules.
A digital twin refers to the virtual model of any physical entity, both of which are interconnected and exchange data in real time. Through its use, we can detect malfunctions in the real robot when the same command is sent to both and the behavior is different. For instance, it may be used to check that actuators have enough torque capacities to comply with the task. In this work, we use the Gazebo simulator to create the digital twin of the ROMERIN organism in two modalities: (a) as a simulated and variable organism for testing of algorithms and (b) a digital mirror of the physical robotic organism to check malfunctions.