A Digital Twin is the concept of creating a digital replica of physical models (such as a robot). This is similar to establishing a simulation using a robot operating system (ROS) or other industrial-owned platforms to simulate robot operations and sending the details to the robot controller. In this paper, we propose a Digital Twin model that assists in the online/remote programming of a robotic cell by creating a 3D digital environment of a real-world configuration. Our Digital Twin model consists of two components, (1) a physical model: FANUC robot (M-10iA/12), and (2) a digital model: Unity (a gaming platform) that comes with specialized plugins for virtual and augmented reality devices. One of the main challenges in the existing approach of robot programming is writing and modifying code for a robot trajectory that is eased in our framework using a Digital Twin. Using a Digital Twin setup along with Virtual Reality, we observe the trajectory replication between digital and physical robots. The simulation analysis provided a latency of approximately 40 ms with an error range of −0.28 to 0.28 across the robot joint movements in a simulation environment and −0.3 to 0.3 across the actual robot joint movements. Therefore, we can conclude that our developed model is suitable for industrial applications.
The serverless platform allows a customer to effectively use cloud resources and pay for the exact amount of used resources. A number of dedicated open source and commercial cloud data management tools are available to handle the massive amount of data. Such modern cloud data management tools are not enough matured to integrate the generic cloud application with the serverless platform due to the lack of mature and stable standards. One of the most popular and mature standards, TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), mainly focuses on application and service portability and automated management of the generic cloud application components. This paper proposes the extension of the TOSCA standard, TOSCAdata, that focuses on the modeling of data pipeline-based cloud applications. Keeping the requirements of modern data pipeline cloud applications, TOSCAdata provides a number of TOSCA models that are independently deployable, schedulable, scalable, and re-usable, while effectively handling the flow and transformation of data in a pipeline manner. We also demonstrate the applicability of proposed TOSCAdata models by taking a web-based cloud application in the context of tourism promotion as a use case scenario.