Industrial robots, due to their great speed, precision and cost‐effectiveness in repetitive tasks, now tend to be used in place of human workers in automated manufacturing systems. In particular, they perform the pick‐and‐place operation, a non‐value‐added activity which at the same time cannot be eliminated. Hence, minimum time is an important consideration for economic reasons in the trajectory planning system of the manipulator. The trajectory should also be smooth to handle parts precisely in applications such as semiconductor manufacturing, processing and handling of chemicals and medicines, and fluid and aerosol deposition. In this paper, an automated trajectory planner is proposed to determine a smooth, minimum‐time and collision‐free trajectory for the pick‐and‐place operations of a 6‐DOF robotic manipulator in the presence of an obstacle. Subsequently, it also proposes an algorithm for the jerk‐ bounded Synchronized Trigonometric S‐curve Trajectory (STST) and the ‘forbidden‐sphere’ technique to avoid the obstacle. The proposed planner is demonstrated with suitable examples and comparisons. The experiments show that the proposed planner is capable of providing a smoother trajectory than the cubic spline based trajectory

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The CDIO INITIATIVE is an innovative educational framework that has been followed in many world-class educational institutions in USA, Europe and Asian countries for producing the next generation of engineers. It provides students with an education in the context of Conceiving -Designing -Implementing -Operating (CDIO) real-world systems and products. Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE), Madurai is one among those institutions following the CDIO framework for all undergraduate engineering programmes since the academic year 2018-19. Though there are training programs for selective faculty members, there had been no intensive hands -on training to all the faculty members. It has been felt from the formal meetings and informal discussions that faculty members needed more clarity and training on the CDIO framework. This has led to the conduct of training workshops online by the TCE academic process team for the faculty members of the institution (n=205), in three batches. Two quizzes have been conducted and feedback has been collected at the end of the workshop for each batch. This research paper analyses the outcome of these workshops measured through the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) exhibited in the assessment activities and feedback. It has been observed that the training workshop satisfies the expectations of the participants with a Satisfaction Index of 0.924. Recommendations have been proposed for interpreting the outcomes of such training workshops to enhance faculty competence through such workshops by addressing the necessary gaps in the forthcoming training workshops.