Schweinfurt is a small southern city in Bavaria, Germany. Although the city of Schweinfurt is small, it is an industrial center of ball bearing in Europe. Schweinfurt is also a city of art. The Museum Georg Schäfer in the city center shows the charm of paintings to visitors all around the world. 19 Students from Shenzhen Technology University (SZTU) arrived in this legendary city on January 11 to begin an 11-day “2020 Winter School of Industrial Development in the Modern World” held by University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (FHWS).

Night view in Schweinfurt

FHWS, founded in 1971, is a famous university of applied sciences in Germany. On January 13, Prof. Meyer showed the students around the Industry 4.0 Laboratory, High Voltage Laboratory, Racing Car Laboratory as well as other characteristic laboratories of FHWS.

SZTU students join in the winter camp in FHWS.

High Voltage Laboratory

Racing Car Laboratory

In the laboratory, students were required to work in small groups to build their own AGV tracking cars. During the course, Prof. Meyer explained the tracking principles of an AGV car, and guided students to finish relevant motion analysis and calculation. Everyone made effort in building an AGV car. However, there was a common problem: AGVs were moving very slowly. Prof. Meyer then explained different control methods of AGV and weighed the pros and cons of them.

SZTU students are listening carefully in the class.

All the students tried different control methods carefully and chose the best one to apply on their AGVs. At the end of the course, there was an exciting race among teams to test which AGV was the fastest.

Exciting car race

Besides the robotics course, SZTU students had a chance to visit SCHAEFFLER, a famous ball bearings manufacturing company, of which the headquarter is located in Schweinfurt, and learned more about the advanced heavy-industry in Germany after visiting the manufacturing process of ball bearings.

SZTU students also paid a visit to Ingolstadt, Munich and other cities, and were deeply impressed by the headquarters of Audi, BMW and so on.

Audi Forum in Ingolstadt

BMW in Munich

The winter school was successful and memorable, and ended on January 21. We would like to thank FHWS for the support as well as Prof. Meyer and Ms. Akarsu for their assistance.

Drafted by Guo Zirui & Chen Jingcheng, students from Sino-German College of Intelligent Manufacturing

Photo by Guo Zirui

Edited by Brian（郑斌）