In the application of automation technology, the automotive industry represents the top class. At the forefront: Europe's largest automobile manufacturer: Volkswagen (including VW).
Reason enough for Professor Jürgen Jasperneite and Benedikt Lücke to visit VW's main plant in Wolfsburg with 30 students from the Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Mechatronics programs as part of the course "Machine-Oriented Networking". Due to its sheer size alone, the site boasts many superlatives: 54,000 people produce 3,500 vehicles here - every day. The car bodies are assembled on an area the size of 17 soccer fields with the help of 1,600 handling and welding robots. All this with a degree of automation of 98 percent. Only two working days are needed to create a vehicle ready for delivery.
During the factory tour, the most important production areas were visited, starting with the press shop, the body shop, the paint shop and the final assembly of the VW Golf VII. These production steps have very different levels of automation. Particularly impressive were the many sophisticated automatic processes of cooperating robots as well as the efforts to improve the ergonomics of the workers' workplaces.
And another superlative to smile about: VW's best-selling product is not a car, but the VW curry sausage, which is sold more than 6 million times a year. A successful excursion into practice at the end of the course and a real insight into a future field of work.