What Is a Digital Twin?

Step inside an auto assembly plant. See workers ratcheting down nuts to bolts. Hear the whirring of air tools. Watch pristine car bodies gliding along the line and robots rolling up with parts.

Now, fire up its digital twin in 3D online. See animated digital humans at work in the exact same, but digital version of the plant. Drag and drop in robots to move heavy materials, and run simulations for optimizations, taking in real-time factory floor data for improvements. That's a digital twin.

A digital twin is a virtual representation - a true-to-reality simulation of physics and materials - of a real-world physical asset or system, which is continuously updated.

Digital twins aren't just for inanimate objects and people. They can be a virtual representation of computer networking architecture used as a sandbox for cyberattack simulations. They can replicate a fulfillment center process to test out human-robot interactions before activating certain robot functions in live environments. The applications are as wide as the imagination.

Digital twins are shaking up operations of businesses. The worldwide market for digital twin platforms is forecast to reach $86 billion by 2028, according to Grand View Research. Its report cites COVID-19 as a catalyst for the adoption of digital twins in specific industries.

What's Driving Digital Twins? The Internet of Things is revving up digital twins.

IoT is helping to enable connected machines and devices to share data with their digital twins and vice versa. That's because digital twins are always on and up-to-date computer-simulated versions of real-world IoT-connected physical things or processes they represent.

Digital twins are virtual representations that can capture the physics of structures and changing conditions internally and externally, as measured by myriad connected sensors driven by edge computing. They can also run simulations within the virtualizations to test for problems and seek improvements through service updates.

Robotics development and autonomous vehicles are just a couple of the growing number of examples used in digital twins to mimic physical equipment and environments.

Autonomous vehicles at a very simple level are robots that operate in the open world, striving to avoid contact with anything, said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at NVIDIA. Eventually we'll have sophisticated autonomous robots working alongside humans in settings like kitchens - manipulating knives and other dangerous tools. We need digital twins of the worlds they are going to be operating in, so we can teach them safely in the virtual world before transferring their intelligence into the real world.

Digital Twins in 3D Virtual Environments Shared virtual 3D worlds are bringing people together to collaborate on digital twins.

The interactive 3D virtual universe is evident in gaming. Online social games such as Fortnite and the user-generated virtual world of Roblox offer a glimpse of the potential of interactions.

Video conferencing calls in VR, with participants existing as avatars of themselves in a shared virtual conference room, are a step toward realizing the possibilities for the enterprise.

Today the tools exist to develop each of these shared virtual worlds in a shared virtual collaboration platform within this environment.

Omniverse Replicator for Digital Twin Simulations At GTC, NVIDIA unveiled Omniverse Replicator to help develop digital twins. It's a synthetic-data-generation engine that produces physically simulated data for training deep neural networks.

Along with this, the company introduced two implementations of the engine for applications that generate synthetic data: NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, a virtual world for hosting the digital twin of autonomous vehicles, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a virtual world for the digital twin of manipulation robots.

Autonomous vehicles and robots developed using this data can master skills across an array of virtual environments before applying them in the real world.

Based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX technology, NVIDIA Omniverse is the world's first scalable, multi-GPU physically accurate world simulation platform.

Omniverse offers users the ability to connect to multiple software ecosystems - including Epic Games Unreal Engine, Reallusion, OnShape, Blender and Adobe - that can assist millions of users.

The reference development platform is modular and can be extended easily. Teams across NVIDIA have enlisted the platform to build core simulation apps such as the previously mentioned NVIDIA Isaac Sim for robotics and synthetic data generation, and NVIDIA DRIVE Sim.

DRIVE Sim enables recreating real-world driving scenarios in a virtual environment to enable testing and development of rare and dangerous use cases. In addition, because the simulator has a perfect understanding of the ground-truth in any scene, the data from the simulator can be used for training the deep neural networks used in autonomous vehicle perception.

As shown in BMW Group's factory of the future, Omniverse's modularity and openness allows it to utilize several other NVIDIA platforms such as the NVIDIA Isaac platform for robotics, NVIDIA Metropolis for intelligent video analytics, and the NVIDIA Aerial software development kit, which brings GPU-accelerated, software-defined 5G wireless radio access networks to environments as well as third-party software for users and companies to continue to use their own tools.

How Are Digital Twins Coming Online? When building a digital twin and deploying its features, corralling AI resources is necessary.

NVIDIA Base Command Platform enables enterprises to deploy large-scale AI infrastructure. It optimizes resources for users and teams, and it can monitor the workflow from early de

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/12/14/what-is-a-digital-twin/...
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