Sparking industry-academia collaborations

News
Outreach
26-09-2024
What are real challenges in control and automation that industry faces? What are advances in research that could help address them?
workshop discussions
Participants
Claudia Fischer

To answer these questions, 15 engineers from industry (from Bühler Group, Festo, maxon motors, INFICON and EKZ) and 15 NCCR Automation researchers (from ETH Zurich, EPFL, FHNW, OST, ZHAW, Empa and Inspire AG) spent one day at ETH’s beautiful Villa Hatt for the second issue of NCCR Automation’s Workshop on Control and Computation Methods.

In the morning session, the companies presented their challenges, giving researchers an insight into their practical problems and discussing them in breakout sessions. In the afternoon, engineers from industry could learn more about different control methods, how model uncertainty can be dealt with, and how the ever-increasing availability of data can improve automation. 

The feedback was universally positive: All participants would recommend this workshop to their friends and are highly motivated to start industry-academia collaborations. The NCCR Automation is proud to facilitate this exchange, and we are looking forward to hosting the next Workshop on Control and Computational Methods in spring of 2025. Reach out to us if you want to be part of it!