IC4HEDS – cross-border cooperation project of Croatian and Hungarian universities and business incubators, that resulted in the development and implementation of e-learning courses about digital transformation and industry 4.0, set of workshops, students’ study trips and networking, is coming to an end soon. The project team’s study trip originally planned to take place at the beginning of the project has been postponed due to COVID restrictions, and finally took place on March 3 and  March 4, 2022.

In the scope of the study trip, project team members visited several institutions, constituent parts of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STUBA), that have years-long cooperation with the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb (FOI). Each of the IC4HEDS project partners had its representatives participating in the study trip, Vjeran Strahonja, PhD, Martina Tomičić Furjan, PhD and Karlo Nadoveza participated from FOI, Ivan Plačko, the director of the lead beneficiary Technology Innovation Centre Medimurje LTD (TICM), lecturers from The Nagykanizsa Campus of the University of Pannonia (UP) Szilárd Jaskó, PhD, Tibor Holczinger, PhD and Sziva Barnabás and the representatives from the Nagykanizsa Business Incubator Zoltan Mihovics and Csilla Cserti. Mario Šercer, head of the Metal Centre Čakovec joined because the institution he leads operates in the same field of expertise as the institutions they visited during the study trip.

IC4HEDS project team

The study trip began on March 3, 2022, with a visit to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, where they had a meeting with Martin Juhas, PhD, head of the industrial automatization at the Institute for Automation, Measurement and Applied Informatics and with Martin Gulan, PhD, an assistant at the Institute. Their hosts presented the automatization lab, with the focus on industry 4.0 and the project FactoRIS – Learning Factories for Digital Transformation of SMEs, cofinanced under the EIT Manufacturing programme.

The second meeting was held at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. During the visit, they first saw the National Centre for Robotics at the Institute of robotics and Cybernetics (IRC) under the guidance of František Duchoň, PhD, with whom they had a meeting after the tour, together with the head of the Institute Jarmila Pavlovičova, PhD.

The project team members at the National Centre for Robotics, at the Institute for robotics and cybernetics

On the second day of the study trip, the team had meetings in Trnava, a small university town, around sixty kilometres away from Bratislava, where the Faculty of Materials Science and Technology is located, as one of the constituent parts of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. Centre of Excellence of 5-axis Machining at Faculty for Material Science and Technology in Trnava was their next stop, where they could see the state-of-the-art equipment for metal machining. The last visit during their stay in Trnava was to the Institute of Applied Informatics, Automation and Mechatronics where they had a meeting with Pavel Važan, PhD and his colleagues about potential future cooperation.

The team benefited from the study trip by witnessing best practices in the higher education system, research and science development at the institution with over 260 years of history. The study trip also resulted in strengthening the connection and cooperation inside the project consortium and gaining new contacts which could potentially lead to a partnership in future projects.

 

This article has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The content of the document is the sole responsibility of  Technology innovation centre Međimurje Ltd. and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union and/or the Managing Authority.