Adaptive Controllers and Digital Twin for Self-Adaptive Robotic Manipulators

Abstract

Robots are increasingly adopted in a wide range of unstructured and uncertain environments, where they are expected to keep quality properties such as efficiency, accuracy, and safety. To this end, robots need to be smart and continuously update their situation awareness. Self-adaptive systems pave the way for accomplishing this aim by enabling a robot to understand its surroundings and adapt to various scenarios in a systematic manner. However, some situations, e.g., adjusting adaptation rules, refining run-time models, narrowing a vast adaptation domain, and taking future scenarios into consideration, etc. may require the self-adaptive system to include additional specialized components. In this regard, this work proposes a novel approach combining the MAPE-K, adaptive controllers, and a Digital Twin of the robot to enable the managing system to be aware of new scenarios appearing at run-time and operate safely, accurately, and efficiently. A state-of-the-art robot model is employed to evaluate the suitability of the approach.