Application of FMI 3.0 Synchronous Clocks to Co-Simulation of Robotic Systems

Given recent technological trends, such as the use of Digital Twins, modeling and simulation have become essential in both the design and the operation of robotic systems. However, developing large simulations that feature several aspects of a robotic system is not trivial. Co-simulation can be used to address this challenge by the hierarchical aggregation of heterogeneous simulators. The recent industry standard Functional Mock-up Interface version 3 (FMI3) adopts the concept of super-dense time to enable both continuous-time and discrete-event simulation. In this work, we extend an existing framework for robotics that supports the creation of modular co-simulation scenarios with simulated or real robots in the loop by upgrading its artifacts to support hybrid co-simulation with FMI3. With these upgraded artifacts, the extended framework accounts for both continuous-time and discrete-event simulations, providing a more comprehensive coverage of scenarios and behaviors of robotic systems. We use a UR5e robotic arm for the demonstration of the FMI3-enabled framework and provide our findings and recommendations from the experiments executed.