Teaching Robot Programming for Industry 4.0

Abstract

This paper presents a master course project on intelligent robotics offered by the University of Padova (Italy). The goal is that of training Master students for Industry 4.0 by offering a multidisciplinary laboratory experience in which two robots and a human must collaborate to fulfill an assembly task: one manipulator robot has to recognize some pieces on a table, manipulate them, and place them on the top of a mobile robot. The mobile robot has to carry these pieces within an arena until reaching an assembly station where the human operator will complete the assembly task. Through our constructivist approach, students learn how to face a rapidly evolving discipline requiring the integration and cooperation of multiple subsystems to create complex behaviors. They learn how to program autonomous robots by using the Robot Operating System. They learn how to exhaustively document their activity explaining design choices, the benefits and the limits of their approaches, as well as proposing new solutions to overcome these limitations. They learn how to properly implement and comment code as well as create step-by-step instructions to enable future users to reproduce their systems. The project is organized as a challenge to motivate students to propose innovative ideas: students are subdivided into teams, every team proposes its own solution, and different scores are assigned according to the proposed difficulty level and the required working time.