Development and Evaluation of Remote Virtual Teach Pendant for Industrial Robotics Education

In industrial robotics education, students often do not have sufficient opportunities to practice skills such as robot programming due to large class sizes, limited lab time, and the cost of robots. There is an urgent need for engineers with industrial robot knowledge and programming as part of their skill set. A teach pendant is a commonly used and inexpensive method of programming industrial robots. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a virtual teach pendant and web server that enables students to do lab exercises remotely. It has been used to help students become familiar with robot anatomy, practice robot motion planning, and program a robot remotely to complete a simple pick-and-place assembly task. The system has been evaluated by 19 two-year college students, 159 four-year college students, and 150 high school students. Pre and post-testing and survey results suggest that the system is useful for learning robot anatomy, motion planning, and robot programming; students would like to have more tools like this to help them learn; and the interface is user-friendly and easy to manipulate. Future directions may include adding advanced programming functions (such as conditional and loop structures) and providing haptic feedback.