Extended reality applications in industry 4.0. – A systematic literature review

Systematic review of digital twin technology and applications

As one of the most important applications of digitalization, intelligence, and service, the digital twin (DT) breaks through the constraints of time, space, cost, and security on physical entities, expands and optimizes the relevant functions of physical entities, and enhances their application value. This phenomenon has been widely studied in academia and industry. In this study, the concept and definition of DT, as utilized by scholars and researchers in various fields of industry, are summarized. The internal association between DT and related technologies is explained. The four stages of DT development history are identified. The fundamentals of the technology, evaluation indexes, and model frameworks are reviewed. Subsequently, a conceptual ternary model of DT based on time, space, and logic is proposed. The technology and application status of typical DT systems are described. Finally, the current technical challenges of DT technology are analyzed, and directions for future development are discussed.

Wearable Motion Capture Devices for the Prevention of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders in Ergonomics-An Overview of Current Applications, Challenges, and Future Opportunities

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) are a major contributor to disability worldwide and substantial societal costs. The use of wearable motion capture instruments has a role in preventing WMSDs by contributing to improvements in exposure and risk assessment and potentially improved effectiveness in work technique training. Given the versatile potential for wearables, this article aims to provide an overview of their application related to the prevention of WMSDs of the trunk and upper limbs and discusses challenges for the technology to support prevention measures and future opportunities, including future research needs. The relevant literature was identified from a screening of recent systematic literature reviews and overviews, and more recent studies were identified by a literature search using the Web of Science platform. Wearable technology enables continuous measurements of multiple body segments of superior accuracy and precision compared to observational tools. The technology also enables real-time visualization of exposures, automatic analyses, and real-time feedback to the user. While miniaturization and improved usability and wearability can expand the use also to more occupational settings and increase use among occupational safety and health practitioners, several fundamental challenges remain to be resolved. The future opportunities of increased usage of wearable motion capture devices for the prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders may require more international collaborations for creating common standards for measurements, analyses, and exposure metrics, which can be related to epidemiologically based risk categories for work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

Digital Twins and Enabling Technologies in Museums and Cultural Heritage: An Overview

This paper presents an overview of various types of virtual museums (ViM) as native artifacts or as digital twins (DT) of physical museums (PM). Depending on their mission and features, we discuss various enabling technologies and sensor equipment with their specific requirements and complexities, advantages and drawbacks in relation to each other at all stages of a DT's life cycle. A DT is a virtual construct and embodies innovative concepts based on emerging technologies (ET) using adequate sensor configurations for (meta-)data import and exchange. Our keyword-based search for articles, conference papers, (chapters from) books and reviews yielded 43 contributions and 43 further important references from Industry 4.0, Tourism and Heritage 4.0. After closer examination, a reference corpus of 40 contributions was evaluated in detail and classified along with their variants of DT-content-, communication-, and collaboration-centric and risk-informed ViMs. Their system features correlate with different application areas (AA), new or improved technologies-mostly still under development-and sensors used. Our proposal suggests a template-based, generative approach to DTs using standardized metadata formats, expert/curator software and customers'/visitors' engagement. It advocates for stakeholders' collaboration as part of a comprehensive validation and verification assessment (V&VA) throughout the DT's entire life cycle.

Immersive virtual reality application for intelligent manufacturing: Applications and art design

Intelligent manufacturing (IM), sometimes referred to as smart manufacturing (SM), is the use of real-time data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) in the production process to achieve the aforementioned efficiencies. Human-machine interaction technology has recently been a hot issue in smart manufacturing. The unique interactivity of virtual reality (VR) innovations makes it possible to create a virtual world and allow users to communicate with that environment, providing users with an interface to be immersed in the digital world of the smart factory. And virtual reality technology aims to stimulate the imagination and creativity of creators to the maximum extent possible for reconstructing the natural world in a virtual environment, generating new emotions, and transcending time and space in the familiar and unfamiliar virtual world. Recent years have seen a great leap in the development of intelligent manufacturing and virtual reality technologies, yet little research has been done to combine the two popular trends. To fill this gap, this paper specifically employs Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines to conduct a systematic review of the applications of virtual reality in smart manufacturing. Moreover, the practical challenges and the possible future direction will also be covered.

Point Cloud Completion Network Applied to Vehicle Data

With the development of autonomous driving, augmented reality, and other fields, it is becoming increasingly important for machines to more accurately and comprehensively perceive their surrounding environment. LiDAR is one of the most important tools used by machines to obtain information about the surrounding environment. However, because of occlusion, the point cloud data obtained by LiDAR are not the complete shape of the object, and completing the incomplete point cloud shape is of great significance for further data analysis, such as classification and segmentation. In this study, we examined the completion of a 3D point cloud and improved upon the FoldingNet auto-encoder. Specifically, we used the encoder-decoder architecture to design our point cloud completion network. The encoder part uses the transformer module to enhance point cloud feature extraction, and the decoder part changes the 2D lattice used by the A network into a 3D lattice so that the network can better fit the shape of the 3D point cloud. We conducted experiments on point cloud datasets sampled from the ShapeNet car-category CAD models to verify the effectiveness of the various improvements made to the network.