A Mixed Reality Approach Enriching the Agricultural Engineering Education Paradigm, against the COVID-19 Constraints

Since the very early beginning of the mankind history, any great difficulty, like wars or diseases, had to be a challenge for progress and innovation, otherwise the game was lost. In this regard, the recent COVID-19 pandemic provides to the learners’ and teachers’ community a great opportunity to better adapt and enrich their educational practices. Initially, aiming to assist students of agricultural engineering to demystify the innovative technologies of their scientific area, a remotely programmed and controlled robotic arm platform for fruit-picking purposes is deployed. This is just the excuse behind which a colorful bouquet of modern and software and hardware components are glued together to provide the potential for supporting a wide range of modern engineering applications. In an era that the speed of the technological achievements makes difficult to categorize their impact in industry, society or education, the proposed approach can be classified as containing mainly mixed reality, mobile, blended and project-based learning characteristics. A first set of results indicate that the discussed platform can greatly assist the students to tackle the lack of physical presence in the laboratory/classroom providing a quite interesting alternative to full in-vitro educational practices.