A Collaborative Robot in the Classroom: Designing 21st Century Engineering Education Together

Abstract

New and interactive robot arms have found their way to the factory floor: the collaborative robots (cobots). Cobots execute simple and routine tasks with the accuracy and precision of tradional industrial robotics. Although cobots often operate highly autonomous, they require human interferance to function. Both production workers and engineers play an essential role in the creation and maintenance of these ‘human-cobot collaborations’. The rising number of cobots in industry increasingly calls for current and future generations of production workers and engineers who are capable of fulfilling their role in human-cobot collaboration. From a development point-of-view, engineering education is a powerful vehicle to prepare production workers and engineers for human-cobot collaboration. However, it is unclear what knowledge, skills, abilities, and other requirements (KSAOs) production workers and engineers need to create and maintain human-cobot collaboration and what engineering education allows the development of these KSAOs. Therefore, our goal was to investigate how engineering education could prepare future production workers and engineers for human-cobot collaboration. We used the O*NET Content Model to deductively analyse 60 interviews about human-cobot collaboration in Dutch industry. Results illustrate how 31 KSAOs were found relevant for the design, programming, operation, and repair of human-cobot collaboration and how these KSAOs were distributed amongst production workers and engineers. Together with a community of practice, we used these insights to design a 240-hour vocational education course on human-cobot collaboration. Key decisions, course content, learning dimensions, and examination compentents are elaborated upon.