Recently, the National Finals of the 19th "Siemens Cup" China Intelligent Manufacturing Challenge were grandly held at Taiyuan University of Technology.
The "NCUT Zhilian" team, guided by teachers Li Chao and Zhai Weifeng from the School of Electrical and Control Engineering of our university, won the National First Prize in the Informationization and Networking category. The "NCUT Qilin" team, supervised by teachers Li Chao and Pang Zhonghua, claimed the National Second Prize in the Lean Intelligent Manufacturing and Collaborative Robotics category.
Additionally, teachers Li Chao and Zhai Weifeng were awarded the title of "2025 Excellent Instructor".
The preliminary round of the competition was held in mid-July, where over 36,000 teachers and students from 968 universities across the country formed 10,737 teams to compete fiercely.
Our university fielded 26 teams, mainly composed of undergraduate students from the 2022 and 2023 cohorts, under the guidance of teachers including Li Chao and Lei Zhenwu from the School of Electrical and Control Engineering, and Yan Hongjuan and Yan Wenhui from the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. These teams participated in 5 categories: Informationization and Networking, Lean Intelligent Manufacturing and Collaborative Robotics, Discrete Industry Motion Control, Free Exploration, and Process Industry Automation. They won 1 Special Prize, 2 First Prizes, 8 Second Prizes, and 8 Third Prizes in the North China Division/National Preliminary Round.
In the national finals, 927 teams from 384 universities, including Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, competed for honors.
The University Academic Affairs Office, School of Electrical and Control Engineering, and School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering attach great importance to the China Intelligent Manufacturing Challenge. They organize an annual promotion conference for the challenge at North China University of Technology to publicize and mobilize students of relevant majors to participate.
Adhering to the university spirit of "seriousness, strictness and rigor", the instructor team actively guides undergraduate and graduate students to participate in the competition. Since the university first formed teams to participate in 2014, it has won a total of 22 national awards including Special Prizes, First Prizes and Second Prizes and more than 100 provincial and ministerial awards in the China Intelligent Manufacturing Challenge. The number of participating and award-winning students has hit new highs repeatedly.
The China Intelligent Manufacturing Challenge has become a powerful grasp for the university to cultivate high-quality applied talents with innovative spirit and ability, as well as an ideal platform for improving engineering application and practical capabilities.
The China Intelligent Manufacturing Challenge is a national Class-A competition under the strategic cooperation framework signed between the Ministry of Education and Siemens AG. With real enterprise engineering projects and scientific research projects as competition topics, real industrial equipment and industrial environments as competition venues, and industrial enterprise engineering standards as assessment and scoring indicators, the competition comprehensively cultivates students' comprehensive ability to solve complex engineering problems and their systematic thinking. In 2019, the competition was included in the assessment programs of the National University Discipline Competition Ranking and the National Undergraduate Robot Competition Index for regular institutions of higher education.
