Using mixed reality based digital twins for robotics education
Horst Orsolits, Sebastian Felix Rauh, José Garcia Estrada
Abstract
The share of people in industrial manufacturing working with robots will increase in the coming years. This creates the need to define further education and training programs which must be tailored to the demand of increased robotics in industry. Combining immersive technologies like mixed reality with robotics education leads a promising path to broaden the access to fundamental knowledge of industrial robotics. As high demands are placed on teaching complex topics like coordinate transformation in six degrees of freedom, which is crucial to understand for operating a six-axes industrial robot, a more intuitive and easier access to robotics must be ensured. Based on this, the aim of this work is to contribute facilitating the use of a mixed reality based digital twin platform for robotics education. To this end, a combined system of desktop robotics and mixed reality is to be expanded and investigated for entry into robotics courses. After the introduction of the Augmented reality Robot Number One (ARNO) platform and insights into its evolution since the initial development, we summarize learning outcomes towards a cost-effective platform solution as well as challenges along the way and future tasks to quantify the solution.