Despite the increasing importance of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in industry, the topic has so far received little attention in education and training. In particular, topics such as occupational safety and the design of HRC are highly relevant in practice. However, for the majority of trainees, the topic of HRC will be of great importance for their future careers. The fact that the topic is not part of the training is partly due to a lack of teaching materials, but also to the high cost of procuring the appropriate robots. The Bremen Institute of Structural Mechanics and Production Systems (bime) is therefore developing a virtual training environment together with the Institute of Technology and Education (ITB) in order to anchor these topics in vocational education and training.

A virtual training environment offers vocational schools and training workshops the advantage that training can be carried out in a production environment with relatively little effort. Compared to the procurement of collaborative robots, these can also be easily expanded with new modules or additional models in the virtual environment. This enables training with a variety of models from different manufacturers. To implement the project, the bime and ITB are cooperating with the company Salt and Pepper Software, which is involved in the implementation of the virtual training environment.

The training environment designed at bime particularly addresses the challenges of occupational safety, the optimization of work processes and economic evaluation. Other research projects have shown that these are the greatest challenges when implementing HRC in the production process. Various learning tasks are designed for the virtual training environment. These can be individually adapted to the performance level of the trainees. These learning tasks are based on real work processes from the field of HRC. They were recorded at various associated partner companies and supplemented with future processes from the field of research. Learning and work tasks are created on the basis of the learning tasks in combination with the practice-oriented work processes. These combine the teaching of theory with the work processes and are therefore suitable for the process orientation aimed for in vocational school teaching.

A virtual training environment offers the advantage that training can be carried out in a production environment with little effort.

A frequent disadvantage of purely virtual environments in the field of HRC is the lack of haptic feedback and thus tactile perception. Integrating haptic feedback into the application increases the benefits of virtual training and further education concepts. Numerous studies have already been carried out in the field of medicine. They have shown that haptic feedback increases learning success, particularly when training surgical procedures. The integration of such feedback into a virtual training environment is possible, but sometimes requires a great deal of effort. It is therefore necessary to weigh up the costs and benefits individually for each learning scenario.