On 6 October 2020, a group of almost ten seminar participants from the Saarland Chamber of Labour and the Kirkel Education Centre visited ZeMA. Under the motto ‘The Great Transformation – Energy Transition, Mobility Transition, Heat Transition and Climate Protection’, the seminar wanted to give food for thought on how to shape a more climate-friendly and thus more sustainable economy.

In its seminar, the Saarland Chamber of Labour wanted to show both the reasons and effects as well as the opportunities and risks of a major transformation. At the same time, the energy, mobility and climate transition is to be understood as a process for society as a whole and possible solutions for a major transformation in the discourse are to be developed.

As part of this seminar, the participants came to ZeMA for a two-hour excursion to learn about the latest technologies and application scenarios in the areas of Industry 4.0, digitization and intelligent materials. After a short introduction to the organization and the research fields of the ZeMA, the participants were able to take an extensive tour of the demonstrator landscape of the institute.

Dipl.-Ing. Christoph Speicher, research associate and head of the Human-Technology-Interaction group at ZeMA, was also able to present demonstrators for human-robot collaboration (HRC), which were created as part of the Robotix Academy and the COTEMACO project. MRK and virtual reality as well as digitization and assistance were the dominant topics this afternoon.

The participants were very interested and confirmed that the visit to ZeMA gave them further information and food for thought in order to engage constructively with the topic of ‘major transformation’.