Enhancing Condition Monitoring with Virtual Reality Visualization for Industrial Application

Monitoring the machines' health in an industrial setting is crucial to maintaining the workflow without disturbance. There are multiple methods commonly used for this purpose that go under conditional monitoring. Conventional conditional monitoring can be time-consuming and difficult to interpret by a non-experienced operator, which increases the risks in such critical applications. Virtual Reality (VR) has been in use for multiple applications to ease the usage of complex tasks via proper visualization. In this paper, a visualization approach of industrial application that monitors the motor’s health connected with a vibration sensor via a programmable logic controller (PLC) is presented. The Beckhoff PLC was programmed using TwinCAT 3 software and linked with Unity VR headsets via MQTT protocol. The user is given the ability to select the number of connected sensors and place them to mimic the actual environment, import their own 3D machine design, test for MQTT broker connectivity, and visualize the machine's health as per the ISO 10826-3 standard. The proposed system has been tested successfully and it is expected to ease visualization in an industrial setup.