Developing an Exercise on Design and Production using 3D CAD and LEGO Car Assembly Robot

Future design and production engineers will need to acquire digital technology and systems thinking in addition to production science. In our laboratory, we are conducting an exercise for undergraduate students as a cornerstone project to experience the basics of digital manufacturing. Specifically, this exercise incorporates design by 3D CAD, modeling by 3D printer, and offline teaching of LEGO car assembly robot. The exercise consists of two sessions. In the first session, students were free to design the roof parts of the LEGO car using 3D CAD (FUSION360) under the restrictions of the dimension. In the second session, an offline teaching exercise was conducted using the robot simulation software WinCapsⅢ(DENSO WAVE) on the robot movement to attach the roof to the base of the LEGO car. In the exercise, we motivated the students by giving them the task of attaching the roof to the base in the shortest possible time, avoiding obstacles installed along the route. By transferring the data created by offline teaching to the actual robot controller, each taught operation is reproduced on the actual machine, and the roof assembly time is competed. It was found that the exercise is useful for engineer education because positive opinions, such as the fun and meaningful class, were obtained from the students who took the class.