A Digital Twin-Based Robotic Control Framework for Rocket Launch Missions

Using robots in rocket launch missions has difficulties in technical verification, task scheduling, monitoring, and optimization. In this paper, we take digital twin (DT) as a systematic toolkit to manage the task of robots, making full use of its inherent advantages in simulation and scheduling complex tasks. We propose a DT-based robotic control framework (DTRCF) for rocket launch missions, which consists of three subsystems: physical entity system, task scheduling system, and virtual entity system. During the launch mission, commands are generated autonomously in the task scheduling system deployed on the cloud and sent to physical entities of robots through the connection layer. Through performing bi-directional mapping of virtual space and physical space, the DT-based robotic control framework covers three stages of launch missions, including verification, execution, and optimization. We designed a prototype of this framework and conducted related experiments to prove the feasibility of our design.