Democratizing Industrial Collaborative Robot Technology through Interactive Workshops in Learning Factories

Abstract

Teaching collaborative robots to non-experts/laypersons has been an ongoing research topic to unfold the promising possibilities of this technology in manufacturing. A teaching concept was designed, implemented as a comprehensive one-day workshop, conducted and evaluated in several EU countries to engage and teach participants from different backgrounds. The content focuses on the essential knowledge that is required to use a collaborative robot to automate a manual assembly process and to interact safely with a cobot in the same workspace. A mixed-methods approach was used to deliver the learning content, consisting of frontal and interactive parts. The implementation was done in two steps. First, 12 workshops were conducted in 5 different EU countries to engage and teach 124 participants from universities and companies in open workshops and learning/teaching factories. Second, the learning content was implemented on a digital learning platform to ensure future deployment by pupils, students, teachers, workers, employees and managers. During the workshops, an evaluation was conducted through questionnaires before and after the event. The results of this evaluation are presented in this paper. Hence, this paper contributes to the research on learning and teaching development, implementation and evaluation focusing on cobot technology in learning and teaching factories.