Abstract:

The growth trend of distance education is confirmed every year in many different areas of education and most vigorously in industrial training programs. The adverse effects of COVID-19 have led to an increase in the use of robots on the factory floor and, consequently, a greater demand for online training due to the shortage of skilled workers to work on robotic production lines. In this scenario, engineering educators involved with industrial robotics should bet on distance learning to qualify professionals in this industrial sector.

One additional problem is that converncional pick-and-place industrial robots and humans cannot work in the same physical space due to safety issues. Although the technical specifications ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 guide laboratories to describe the requirements for collaborative robot design, there are still few remote learning facilities that meet these requirements. The problem of building a teaching environment with real practical experiments, similar to what happens on the factory floor, still demands feasible solutions from the didactic and technical points of view.

Given the above, this paper presents a remote teaching method for human-robot collaboration on the factory floor. Its main objective is to assist in the new era of distance learning for subjects related to industrial automation, typically the use of collaborative robots.

The methodological framework consists of three joint modules:
- The first contains the web platform's architecture for digital interconnection of robotic objects, cameras, and the internet.
- The second module represents the teaching cycle, which presents three interconnected phases: planning (a stage that consists of predicting and programming the course activities); orientation (in this phase, all actions aim at guiding the student to reach the proposed objectives); and control (a step that permeates the constant supervision of the learning process to be conducted effectively).
- The third module represents the problem-solving method, covering the selection of actuator and sensor problems and the orientation of the activities. It is up to the student to solve the proposed problem. Therefore, the distance learning methods currently use only theory and simulation for the teaching-learning process.

The proposed method, in addition to containing theory and simulation, is differentiated by practical activities via remote connection for automatic programming, visual guidance, and error recovery.

Keywords:

Remote Engineering Laboratories, Robotics Teaching, Collaborative Robots.