Recently, the first Robert Engineering Undergraduate Major in China was set in School of Automation,SEU.The major aims at cultivating a group of robot engineering professional talents in order to foster system engineers for intelligent manufacturing and high-tech robot D&R enterprises, and to form solid ground for future robot engineering scientists.

“The present polytechnic schools and vocational schools focus on cultivation of robot-related applied talents, in other words, teaching students how to use robots. Furthermore, even for those postgraduate students of colleges or universities, intelligent robot and its application is so far a research orientation belonging to automation. Before that, robot engineering is not regarded as an undergraduate major by the minister of education.” Wei Haikun, Dean of School of Automation in SEU told the journalist that, the present “robots” could generally be divided into three categories, including industrial robots, service robots and specialized robots. The newly established major serves for industrial robots in manufacturing industry.

Made in China 2025, transformation and upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry both require great demands for robot engineering talents but such needs could hardly be satisfied. Robot or robot engineering as an undergraduate major has only been set in foreign universities within five years, and it belongs to different supporting disciplines. However, one thing worth mentioning is that the cultivation of undergraduate talents has one feature in common—operating personnel training based on computer technology and making use of intelligent integration application, which caters to the primary objective in the field.

According to Prof. Wei, “this year we plan to enroll about 30 students but the major is still attributed to automation and not listed separately. When students enter into sophomore year, they will face discipline split-flow and turn to the robot engineering. ”