Abstract:

Since academic year 2021/2022, the School of engineering of the University of Bergamo offers a new Master’s Degree in Mechatronics and Smart Technology Engineering (STE) that combines the traditional aspects of mechanical engineering with specialisms from the ICT, such as electronics, automation and robotics.
The MSc course is divided into two curricula: Mechatronics and STE, enabling students to orient their choices with reference to the objectives and learning paths most in line with their own interests.
The STE curriculum provides mechanical engineers with additional knowledge and skills in different contexts, such as manufacturing plants, building automation and human activities.
The Mechatronics curriculum aims to train mechanical engineers to develop projects involving mechatronic products, i.e. mechanically-based systems on which information engineering technologies are grafted.

In the second semester of the second year, students carry out a multidisciplinary laboratory activity. In this course, students are organized into small groups and carry out project activities in collaboration with industrial partners under the supervision of a multidisciplinary team of professors.
The optional course of Mechanics of Robots (MR) is delivered in the second semester of the second year and it’s mainly focused on the kinematic and dynamic analysis of industrial manipulator. Moreover, a part of the course is devoted to the simulation and programming of these mechatronic systems, with the aims to give the students the knowledge and the skills to program and simulate multirobot cells using the most wide spread simulation programs (e.g. RobotStudio, KUKA.Sim, WinCapsIII, etc.) developed by the main Robot manufacturers.
In particular, we introduced RobotStudio in the MR course during COVID-19 lockdowns.
RobotStudio is ABB's simulation and offline programming software, offering a complete virtual 3D replica (digital twin) of a robotic cell so you can see the behaviour of your production line remotely.
It is designed to not only apply actual tasks and processes to working robots, but also to remotely simulate and test new programming techniques without compromising ongoing live production.
Despite the lack of physical access to the Robotics Lab – often for extended periods of time – the students were still able to receive a comprehensive program of educational training, programming and optimization experiences, entirely offline and at last to verify the program on the real manipulator.
Since in our lab, among the others, an ABB IRB120 6 axes robot is available, we asked the students, as course project, to program offline a rather simple robotic working cell and test it on the actual manipulator.

The paper describes in details the steps we have taken to introduce students to simulation environment, beginning with very simple examples to more comprehensive ones. In conclusion, the adoption of a commercial simulation and programming software is useful to improve the learning and understanding of many concepts such as direct and inverse kinematics and dynamics of a robot, manipulator workspace, robot required energy and power, singular configurations and so on.
Moreover, it allows the remote programming and testing of a digital twin of a robotic cell, before working directly on the real manipulator in our mechatronic lab.

Keywords:

RobotStudio, project based learning, robotic applications.