The EPSG is calling on students at European Universities and Technical Colleges to participate in the 4th European Industrial Ethernet Awards.
There has been great feedback regarding the Industrial Ethernet Award since its beginning in June: there have been requests from British, Russian, Spanish and Italian universities, who want to participate at the award; hence, they are already preparing submissions.
“In Italy we are in close contact to almost 40 universities, in France we have sent the information to over 400 university contacts and the German Education Network is in close cooperation with the Mechatronics Cluster, which has several thousand receivers”.
Awards will be given to the most innovative projects and automation concepts based on the open Industrial Ethernet POWERLINK protocol.
Applicable projects range from mechatronic applications to the creation of solutions for industrial applications by developing new devices with POWERLINK interfaces and even implementation of new features in the openPOWERLINK stack. Projects must be submitted by the end of the year and implemented by June 2017.
Popular with colleges and universities
POWERLINK enables high-performance real-time communication that can be used to create solutions for many of the challenges faced in industrial applications. Absolute openness is one of the main reasons POWERLINK is so popular with colleges and universities and used in many research projects.
The openPOWERLINK protocol stack is open source and released under the BSD license on the SourceForge web-based service for developers. It can be downloaded here and immediately tried out: http://openpowerlink.sourceforge.net/. Due to its architecture, the stack is freely scalable and can be implemented on a wide range of hardware and software platforms without limitations.
Attractive cash prizes
The Industrial Ethernet Awards are being held by the EPSG together with partners OSADL, B&R and BE.services. Winning teams will receive attractive cash prizes and take part in an exciting social event. They can also publish their scientific findings as sponsored open access articles. The award ceremony will take place in the summer of 2017.
Further information regarding the procedure and the call for projects (CFP) can be found on the awards website: http://www.ethernet-powerlink.org/en/award.