Laboratory tasks are a powerful pedagogical strategy for developing competences in science and engineering degrees, making students understand in a practical way the theoretical topics explained in the classroom. However, performing experiments in real conditions is usually expensive in terms of time, money and energy, as it requires expensive infrastructures that are generally difficult to maintain in good conditions. To overcome this problem, virtual reality has proven to be a powerful tool to achieve sustainability, making it easy to update laboratories without the need to acquire new equipment. Moreover, the ability to introduce practical knowledge into classrooms without leaving them, makes virtual laboratories capable of simulating typical operating environments as well as extreme situations in the operation of different devices. A typical subject in which students can benefit from the use of virtual laboratories is robotics. In this work we will develop an immersive virtual reality (VR) pedagogical simulator of industrial robotic arms for engineering students. With the proposed system, students will know the effects of their own designed trajectories on several different robotic arms and cell environments without having to buy all of them and being safe of damaging the cell components. The simulation will be checking for collisions of the elements in the scene and alert the student when they happen. This can be achieved with a robotic simulator, but the integration with immersive VR is intended to help students better understand robotics. Moreover, even having a real robotic arm available for students, with this proposed VR method, all the students have the opportunity to manage and learn his own version of the robotic cell, without waiting times generated by having less robotic arms than students in classroom.

In the footwear sector, automation is often performed by robotic arms due to the inherent adaptive requirements of some of its tasks. With the Industry 4.0 revolution, automation is even less human dependent than before. The fact that fewer people interact with machinery during the manufacturing process has led to a rising need for production monitoring. The interconnection of machines present in 4.0 environments makes monitoring possible at a low investment cost. In this paper, a common communication layer is proposed to enable homogeneous status data retrieval of robotic arms from several different robot manufacturers. This layer is then attached to a 3D simulator software as a client, responsible for the monitoring process. Experiments proved the feasibility of the proposed method in a test bench scenario applying the required constraints of time, cost, bandwidth and disk space.