Educating engineers for industry 4.0: Virtual worlds and human-robot-teams: Empirical studies towards a new educational age

The term "Industry 4.0" symbolizes new forms of technology and artificial intelligence within production technologies. Smart robots are going to be the game changers within the factories of the future and will work with humans in indispensable teams within many processes. With this fourth industrial revolution, classical production lines are going through comprehensive modernization, e.g. in terms of in-the-box manufacturing, where humans and machines work side by side in so-called "hybrid teams". Questions about how to prepare for newly needed engineering competencies for the age of Industry 4.0, how to assess them and how to teach and train e.g. human-robot-teams have to be tackled in future engineering education. The paper presents theoretical aspects and empirical results of a series of studies, carried out to investigate the competencies of virtual collaboration and joint problem solving in virtual worlds.