Teaching robot programming for industry 4.0

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.