The Effectiveness of Virtual Environments for Teaching Robotics

Since the academic year 2021/2022, the School of Engineering of the University of Bergamo offers a new Master’s Degree in Mechatronics and Smart Technology Engineering (STE) that combines traditional aspects of mechanical engineering with specialisms from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT), such as electronics, automation and robotics. This MSc course is divided into two curricula: Mechatronics and STE, enabling students to orient their choices with reference to the objectives and learning paths most in line with their own interests. The optional course of Mechanics of Robots (MR) is delivered in the first semester of the first year of both curricula and it’s mainly focused on the kinematic and dynamic analysis of industrial manipulators. Moreover, a part of the course is devoted to the simulation and programming of these mechatronic systems, with the aim to give the students the knowledge and the skills to program and simulate multi-robot cells using the most widespread simulation programs (e.g. RobotStudio, KUKA.Sim, WinCapsIII, etc.) developed by the main Robot Manufacturers. In particular, we introduced ABB's simulation and offline programming software RobotStudio in the MR course during COVID-19 lockdowns, due to the lack of physical access to the Robotics Lab. That experience showed us that RobotStudio could be profitably used to quickly highlight some theoretical aspects, avoiding the computational complexities and details required by an implementation in MatLab or other computer language .