In the case of engineering education, one way or another, Universities and other educational institutes struggle to handle the practices due to a high number of students or a lack of equipment and laboratories. The students don't get enough practical knowledge during their studies. Theoretical knowledge is still essential nowadays, but students will only know the basics with proper practical knowledge. One example - in the case of mechatronics - is the startup process of a programmable logic controller (PLC) controlled system (connect to the device, add or scan the I/O terminals, etc.). With the lack of these abilities, freshly graduated students will face more challenges at the beginning of their careers since the onboarding process will be more protracted and frustrating, not to mention that they may not pass the interview stage several times. These failures will affect the student's professional life and give the institution a bad name. This paper proposes a laboratory and workstation concept for teaching automation technology to mechatronics students at undergraduate and graduate levels. The concept started with the idea that we were trying to find the golden mean in case of the following problems: high number of students, lack of equipment and teachers. In the first step, we specified the lab size to get the maximum capacity one teacher could handle. Then, we started to design the workstations, where we intensely collaborated with the partner companies to ensure that the new workstations would be useful from the industry point of view. Later in the paper, the concept of a 15-station control engineering laboratory with several undergraduate-level measuring stations capable of performing basic control engineering and digital servo drive tasks will be presented. In addition to these stations, several high-value workstations have been designed to provide graduate-level education, including image processing, 3-axis servo control, XTS magnetic field control, etc. The curriculum of the subjects related to the lab will also be mentioned. We would like to provide insight into the tasks the students should do in practice, from the first step to the end of their studies. We expect that the students not only get practical knowledge but also understand the theoretical knowledge of not only the subject of automation but also the other subjects in the curriculum. © 2024
Author Keywords
Index Keywords
