The eRobotics Approach as a Unifying Concept for eLearning and eSystems Engineering

Today, simulation systems are an essential part in research and development. While current entertainment domains fully exploit the technical possibilities of modern graphics hardware and state of the art rendering approaches, many Virtual Reality (VR) simulation system in scientific contexts put the focus on numerical results with rather functional representations. The novel research field of eRobotics can be understood as an eService related to advanced robotic applications in eSystems engineering using VR technologies. The concepts of semantic world models and graph databases provide new opportunities for the development of a new class of modern multi-domain VR simulation systems that combine the benefits of scientific simulations and attractive computer graphics. Corresponding eRobotics systems take the step from rather functional scientific simulations to attractive demonstrators, which can equally be applied in motivating virtual training and eLearning scenarios. In this paper, we will introduce novel system structures and techniques for the realization of practical eRobotics systems. Practical applications in a broad range of domains in industry, environment and space will demonstrate the benefits of this unifying approach, which correlates closely with the ideas of the recent trend of "Gamification".