Interactive E-Learning Environment for Cognitive Robotics

While robots are increasingly present in everyday environments as vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, or voice assistants, cognitive robots that autonomously help the elderly, prepare meals, do the laundry, or clean up are still missing. This is due to various reasons. Besides such robots being less cost-efficient, needing more knowledge, and the ability to safely perform task variations in changing environments, successful research applications are rarely adopted by industry. Although there are robots that already are able to prepare meals, clean the table, or fold the laundry, these applications cannot easily be implemented by someone who is not familiar with the available robots, their cognitive architecture, and their knowledge framework. In order to help more people get familiar with robotics, reuse existing infrastructure in simulation environments, and implement their own applications on this basis, we propose an immersive E-Learning environment for Cognitive Robotics that not only introduces and describes the different aspects needed for developing robotic applications, but also offers easy-to-use tutorials on how to program robots that are based on simulation environments that link to the different software modules a robot needs to execute actions. We define a set of competences for Cognitive Robotics that covers the required content-related and process-related competences. We present the underlying didactical approaches such as APKIPE (Ger. AVIVA), adaptive learning, and self-directed learning, as well as an approach how to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed platform. Lastly, we demonstrate how the learning environment based on the premises of the described didactical approaches can be used to achieve the competences required to develop control systems for Cognitive Robotics.