Industrial Engineering at Siemens AG — Europeans@Siemens Programme
Published:
From August 2019 to February 2023, I was part of the Europeans@Siemens programme in Berlin — an international dual-education initiative combining structured engineering training with practical project work across Siemens’ industrial divisions.
The programme covered PLC programming and industrial control systems, machine vision and sensor integration, robotics and automation systems, embedded systems for Industry 4.0 environments, and high-voltage electrical systems and cabinet wiring to DIN-VDE standards.
The most technically substantial work was instrumentation and control tasks at Siemens’ 4800 MW power plant using the SPPA-T3000 Distributed Control System. Working on a live industrial DCS at that scale requires precision, systematic thinking, and an understanding of how safety-critical software behaves under real operating conditions — a very different environment from academic or prototyping contexts.
The final project of the programme was a camera-based sorting system integrating a machine vision pipeline with a robotic arm. This was my first hands-on experience combining computer vision and robotics in an industrial setting, and it directly motivated my later work on vision-based calibration and 3D reconstruction.
This background is what makes my research grounded in practice rather than purely theoretical. I understand what industrial robotic cells look like, what goes wrong in production environments, and what it means to deliver something that works reliably under real operating conditions.