VirtualPlant — a 3D Factory Simulator

Thanks to a little time working-from-home at the start of 2021, I decided to embark on a small prototype of a 3D factory simulator.

I had used commercial simulation software before such as CIROS, Siemens NX, and Factory.io, All of them are great software- much broader in scope than this little project — but since all of these are paid software, and I like the challenge of writing software from scratch, i figured i would see what i can come up with myself…

Goals :

I set myself a few goals to achieve

• Any Physical or Soft PLC with OPCUA should be able to communicate with the virtual environment
• The environment should be physics based
• The environment should be flexible enough to be expandable to multiple use cases

Tech Stack :

• The engine of choice was Godot. I chose Godot as I had used it a year or so earlier, and it was completely cross-platform, and open-source allowing me to develop on both my mac and windows systems. VirtualPlant will build and run on Windows/Linux/Mac — and is to my knowledge the only Factory simulator to do so.
• The communication to PLC’s would be handled by node-opcua. I chose to abstract this to a second language as (1) I had used node-opcua previously (2) Theoretically, the abstraction means future communication drivers can be written without the need to edit the program itself.
• Godot communicates with the drivers via WebSockets
• (Basic) 3D work was completed in blender.

Initial Prototypes

Some early test work, getting the physics to behave nicely, and testing a very simple OPCUA driver, which I eventually re-wrote

For the 2019 WorldSkills UK Mechatronic Team Selection competition in March, I wanted to design a modular production line that — that produced popcorn (and drinks)

The System needed to be capable of dispensing & weighing popcorn kernals, transferring them into a popcorn popper, and then popping them

The system (as seen in the GIF) was comprised of 5 tasks, spread over 3 days (14 hours build time)

The competitors build up the system, starting with the simplest system, and then moving on to the more complex features as the days progress.

The system ejects a pot from a magazine, checks if it is the right way up usign an analog IR height sensor, then transfers it to the filling area, on station 2. It then either fills with popcorn, or liquid, depending on the choice selected from the HMI. — The the pot is transfered back to the 1st station, and then onto the 3rd station. At this point the system allows you to pump the popcorn down to the popcorn popper, and then the popcorn popper is turned on using a networked plug socket (240v)

About two years ago I started my role as the Mechatronics Training Manager for Worldskills UK

The role involves training and planning training sessions, and competitions with a group of competitors (6 max), with the ultimate goal of selecting a team of two to progress to international competition.

As part of my role, it is increasingly important to log the progress, times, and scores of various tasks, to be able to benchmark competitors against each other. This, coupled with a need to collect reviews and provide feedback to each of the competitors, and provide an opportunity to share files with competitors, led me to the task of building a dedicated tracking and metrics site.

I embarked to build the site, and, due to my choice of stack, decided to name it “nodeSkills”

Nearly 2 years ago I was in AbuDhabi for the 2017 WorldSkills Competition

Here we are again with the 2019 final approaching. I wish all the best to the whole team, and to Jack and Danny — the UK’s Mechatronics Team.

FE Week on Twitter

Bronze medalists and mechatronics duo Danny Slater (left) and Jack Dakin are lost for words after tonight's success #TeamUK #EuroSkillsBudapest https://t.co/JnErWuf6Sx

Jack and Danny have been training hard for the last 3 years for their place in team. They successfully gained a well-deserved BRONZE medal in Euroskills Budapest 2018 — You can see a reaction interview with them here.

At our team selection event in March 2019 — They Secured their spot in TeamUK — with a popcorn inspired MPS Station

Good Luck all!

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