FROM FACTORY-FLOOR TO UNIVERSITY

The interaction between industry and university is often discussed. Industry participants feel they do not have enough time to spend with academics because of tight deadlines to achieve their goals. The other hand, professors and their students do not have availability and resources for responding quickly to industry activities. Both sides recognize the associated problems and feel the consequences of various forms. One way to reduce the distance between them is to provide industrial labs that resemble the factory floor at the university.

Thus, not only, students may work on a real technological base, but also the industry's problems can be brought to the university laboratory. To ensure that relevant industrial problems will be studied, the industry needs help in the formulation of the problem being researched.

The course of Automation and Control Engineering from UNESP Sorocaba is aimed at training human resources with skills in automation and control activities related to the development of automatic control processes, integrating electronic commands, intelligent manufacturing and industrial robotics.

In order to achieve its objectives, one of the pillars of the university consists of a wide range of modern equipments and software for industrial automation, which allows the circuit assembly from most primitive until configuration and programming of a complex system of integrated manufacturing.

This paper describes industrial automation equipments and laboratory structure offered to students of Control and Automation Engineering course at UNESP Sorocaba as alternative to close technologies and real problems on the job until academic world. The strategic is to do students understand theory and operations in robotic and industrial automation by means to manipulating real production systems locate at university.