Production overview
Recipe, good parts and rejects, completed trays, robot position and active alarms, updated several times per second next to the 3D view of the cell.
Industry 4.0 · Digital twin
The digital twin of a robotic cell for tomato packaging
A pick & place cell with an igus drylin E Cartesian robot, machine vision and predictive maintenance, simulated in real time and securely accessible from anywhere.
Demo access
Read-only demo account: you can explore everything, but you cannot control anything.
Username
demoPassword
demo1234The project
A pick & place kit for small and medium-sized agricultural businesses: tomatoes travel on a food-grade conveyor, a camera checks their quality and size, the robot picks the good ones with a soft suction cup and places them in trays, while rejects go to a dedicated bin. The digital twin reproduces the whole cell before it is even built.
1
Design and commission in simulation
The PLC program runs against a faithful virtual plant: conveyor, photocells, vision, gripper and robot. Logic errors, faults and edge cases are found before commissioning.
2
See the plant remotely
A web dashboard shows the cell in 3D, the production status and the sensors in real time, from anywhere, with no way to act on the machine.
3
Anticipate failures
Non-invasive current, vibration and temperature sensors feed health indicators and estimates of the time left before an alarm.
How it works
Data leaves the plant in one direction only. Control stays on site; only what is needed to observe and analyse reaches the outside.
Plant
Cell and digital twin
- CODESYS PLC (simulated for now)
- igus robot with igus Robot Control
- Physics simulation and machine vision
- Local web app with roles and exclusive control
Gateway IT/OT
Outbound only
- Reads the plant over OPC UA, never writes
- Publishes via MQTT over HTTPS
- Buffers data if the network drops
- About 24 kbit/s, regardless of the number of users
Cloud
Remote dashboard
- Real-time 3D view and variables
- History and predictive maintenance
- Read-only, with authentication
- Automatic replay if the link is down
What the dashboard shows
All images are real screenshots of the application.
The cell in 3D, in real time
Robot, conveyor, parts and sensors move with the data coming from the plant. Every device can be clicked to open its card: type, model, specifications, position and current values.
Predictive maintenance
Eight sensors monitor the conveyor, the robot and the electrical cabinet. For each one: status, estimated health, history with thresholds and estimated time until the alarm level is reached.
- Vibration according to ISO 10816 with bearing indicators
- Motor currents and temperatures
- Belt slip, cabinet temperature
Machine vision in the loop
A virtual camera frames the pick station; a vision algorithm measures position, size and defects of every tomato and passes the result to the PLC, with the same errors as a real measurement.
Always clear what you are looking at
The dashboard states whether the data comes from the simulation or from the plant, and whether it is live. If the link drops, it replays the last production period with a clearly visible warning.
Technologies
Industrial components and standards.
igus drylin E Cartesian robot
igus Robot Control motion control
CODESYS PLC IEC 61131-3
OPC UA plant data
MQTT transport to the cloud
Note: the cell shown in the demo is a simulated plant (digital twin); the PLC program
and the robot motion are simulated as well, as stated in the dashboard. The architecture is the same one
planned for the real plant.
Try it now
Log in with username demo and password demo1234: 3D view, sensors, history and events, read-only.
Open the live dashboard →