Analysing Mixed Reality Simulation for Industrial Applications: A Case Study in the Development of a Robotic Screw Remover System

A Mixed Reality (MR) simulation aims to enable robot developers to create safe and close-to-real world environments from a mixture of real and virtual components for experimenting with robot systems. However, the reliability of the simulation results and its usefulness in solving practical problems remain to be validated. This paper presents an evaluation of an MR simulator by examining its use for the development of a robotic screw remover system. Quantitative evaluation compares the robot's trajectories produced in our MR simulation with those from a real world experiment, yielding results that indicate the MR simulation reliably represents the real world. A user study was conducted and the results demonstrate that the MR simulator gives users a stronger confidence of accurate results in comparison to a virtual simulator.