COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF CREATIVITY IN THE DESIGN OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS

Nowadays, the concept of education in industrial engineering is changing faster worldwide due to the new developments of CAD/CAE/CAM/PLM environment with collaborative capabilities. In fact, collaborative virtual environments are increasingly present in the daily work of engineers, and this issue must be translated to education. There is a demand of engineers in this field and future industrial engineers should be trained to address this new challenge. Students must understand the importance of the connectivity between different engineering fields in multidisciplinary work. Therefore, besides the basic knowledge and competences those students acquire in traditional courses they have to learn how to communicate virtually with other colleagues to increase the productivity and creativity of their designs. Furthermore, 3D printing plays also an important role in exploring new designs and ideas.

The work presented in the paper is based on active learning where the students and instructor communication is based on both concepts, virtual and face-to-face. To this aim, two different platforms are used. One is educational and the other is professional oriented. Thus, the aim is to increase student's engagement through a reflective process including online discussion and evaluation of their work. The collaborative tools allow to take into account both individual activity and participation. In this way, instructors can include corrective actions when the student takes incorrect steps or their participation is not considered enough.

This paper presents an example of a collaborative virtual environment used in the design of a robotic gripper. The work is carried out in the last year of the Industrial Engineering degree where the students have acquired most of the basic and technological competences. Using computer aided methods a new design of the gripping system is proposed. The students have to learn how to interact virtually using the CAD/CAE/CAM platform to present the kinematic and dynamic behaviour of various multibody models. In their work the design of an original robotic gripper is proposed to the students as a challenge to be achieved. Robotic research and education have gained significant importance in recent years due to the necessity of modification of well-known system to fulfill with specific requirements demanded by clients. The kinematic and dynamic design is presented for an underactuated mechanism. The 3-D design model of the gripper is manufactured and presented together with the mechanical, electrical and electronic systems necessary to work properly. The result is to enhance the capabilities of the engineers to create innovative designs.