Samenvatting

Abstract – The path of the cobot: the preparation of education
The technological educators at Saxion University of Applied Sciences and Regional Community College Twente and the Dutch manufacturing industry are facing a multitude of challenges. They are experiencing a shortage of (potential) employees, new technologies are rapidly entering the market and the customer demand is changing (UWV, 2018; Lasi, et al., 2014). Thus, educational institutions and companies subsequently are at a loss of what to do. How can they prepare the future employees of this industry whilst it is currently so unsure what exactly this industry would look like by the time they are entering it? The collaborative robot, also known as cobot, can be a form of technology that will be utilized in the future. Ongoing research notices that this development is currently not being used for its cooperation with humans, which created the question as to what preparation should be given to students by these technological educators (Peshkin, 1999; Bergman et al, 2019; Peron, Sgarbossa, & Strandhagen, 2020).
The research group Human Capital in Smart Industry is supporting educational institutions and companies in their search for a solution for the aforementioned challenges. As the name suggests, they are researching what capabilities humans need in the smart industry that is developing right now (Saxion, n.d.). One of these researches is guided towards the cobot, in their RoboTAO project. Before the start of this thesis, the project has already done market research and a test experiment to gain more insight into the question what educational institutions need in order to improve their cobot education, which is quite a complex matter, since it is also unclear what this education should look like (Voogt & Roblin, 2012). This also formed the basis for this thesis, in which the central management question is ‘what should the research group Human Capital in Smart Industry and technical educators do to improve their human-cobot collaboration and education?’ supported by the research question ‘when does human-cobot interdependence result in optimal work design perceptions and performance for students working with a cobot?’
This thesis builds forth on the previously mentioned test setting of the experiment and focusses on how work design and decision latitude shape and influence performance. This will be done by having 10 students participate in a practical experiment in which they will be asked to collaborate with a cobot. By means of the Work Design Questionnaire by Morgeson and Humphrey (2006), an interview and observations this thesis will analyze how these different students will work with this cobot and what they think of their experience. In the end this will lead to a recommendation on how the technological education regarding human-cobot collaboration can be best formed and improved.
For this thesis we had 10 participants in the practical experiment. In this experiment they had to put together custom ordered keyboards together with the cobot. The cobot could scan the barcode to check if they were putting together the correct board, it could hand over the keyboard, it could give the correct keys in the order they were supposed to be placed on the board and finally the cobot could do a final check to see if the board was assembled correctly. In order to analyze different forms of cooperation, we provided students with a low, medium or high level of freedom to decide how they want to cooperate with the cobot. For example, by giving them the freedom to use only part of what the cobot could do for them.
 
In this research we concluded that the human-cobot interdependence results in the most optimal work design perceptions and performance when the students had medium freedom to decide. Firstly, because the work design perceptions were