An industrial robotics course based on a graphical simulation package

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing introduction of industrial robots in the manufacturing industry, with several studies that predict the increased dissemination of robots in industrial and service sectors. On the other hand, there is often the lack of people able to plan the introduction of these equipments in manufacturing environments and to operate it after its inception. This leads to the need to train undergraduates in the operation and programming of industrial robots. Due to the Portuguese economic situation, there is a lack of funding for the higher schools, leading to the need of finding innovative ways to teach these subjects. Bearing in mind these ideas, in this paper is described a course on industrial robotics, which is based in the achievement of the practical training using commercial off-theshelf robot simulation software for off-line programming.

Implementation of a novel industrial robotics course and its evaluation by students

“…The program of the course is briefly outlined below (a detailed description of the course program can be found in [31]). This program was developed in order to achieve the first course objective, presented in the previous subsection.…”

“…Considering these facts, the main objective of this course is to teach the basis of robotic manipulation and its main application fields, being the aspects of mathematical foundations of robotics addressed in other MEEC course. The ROBIN course has a duration of 20 weeks (of which 4 weeks are for evaluation purposes), each comprising two hours of theoretical lectures, one hour for students' mentorship and two hours of hands-on laboratory practice, corresponding to six European Credit Transfer Units (ECTU) [31].…”

“…Realizing these facts, when the Portuguese High School system had to adjust to the Bologna Agreement [1] in 2006, it was decided to offer an optional course on Industrial Robotics (termed ROBIN) to the students of the Master Course on Electrical and Computer Engineering (Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrotécnica e de Computadores -MEEC), offered at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto -ISEP) [31]. This Master Course is organized into four specialization areas, namely Automation and Systems (Automação e Sistemas -AS), Autonomous Systems (Sistemas Autónomos -SA), Telecommunications (Telecomunicações -T) and Industrial Planning and Systems (Sistemas e Planeamento Industrial -SPI), and the ROBIN course was to be offered mainly to the students of the MEEC-AS area.…”