Pure research and theoretical breakthroughs from academia drive the science forward. Working with industry to define practical problems, and find meaningful solutions, puts that science to work. That is what we mean by knowledge and technology transfer: from the lab into action
Automation is found in almost all industries. We therefore work with a broad variety of companies, from building automation to precision manufacturing to mobility to chemistry and many more, and we are always interested in exploring new challenges and expanding our industry network. The collaboration modes range from small projects like individual co-supervised Bachelor or Master theses to multi-year joint research endeavours involving several researchers across different groups.
Our “Workshops on Control and Computational Methods” are a very popular format to find the perfect academic match for your practical challenges. Learn more about these workshops.
Next to collaborating with existing companies, we strongly encourage and support our researchers in their own entrepreneurial ambitions and help them translate their research results into viable business ideas by offering patent search training, legal advice, financial support as part of our industry call, and entrepreneurship workshops and courses.
The bench2biz programme is a two-week crash course in entrepreneurship that forces our start-uppers to ask all the important non-technical questions related to starting your own business and give them a head start. Several of our researchers went through this intensive programme, read up on their experiences here on our news page.
Our efforts in this area have led to the successful incorporation of unjam, kuafu, nuorail, and viboo.
Open science and accessibility of research does not end at publishing papers. We like to go the extra mile to make our results reproducible and our methods useful for other researchers by developing software toolboxes. Their topics reach from distributed Markov-Decision-Process solvers to video stabilisation to system identification, electric grid simulation and many more. Find the complete list of them here.
We don’t just innovate – we reimagine what’s possible. As we investigate how to design and manage the electric grids of the future, we are working with various living labs (Empa’s famous NEST building, the EPFL campus, a sustainable industrial park in Sisslerfeld and the Walenstadt electric grid) to put cutting-edge technologies into practice and harvest data on actual usage to inform further research.
