March 29, 2021

22 students from the International Management, Industrial Engineering and Management, and Energy Efficient Microcontrolling courses in the Automotive Technology program have joined forces with fellow students from KIT to develop a sensor-controlled "corona traffic light" as their own product in the winter semester 2020/21 at the Learning Factory of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, an innovative education and research platform for manufacturing technology for the transfer of knowledge and new technologies at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences.

The idea behind the project: the students wanted to develop a product that could be put to good use in everyday life, and so came up with the idea for a "Corona traffic light." It is designed to measure the number of people entering and exiting a room and control access accordingly. "As a team, we want to make a contribution to society and make life safer again for everyone," says Sarah Kleeberger, a 6th semester International Management student at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. "Customers and guests should feel comfortable in their surroundings and at the same time act according to the current Corona distance and hygiene rules."

How does the Corona traffic light "Stop & Go-vid19" work? A camera and sensors detect how many people enter a room and also how many leave. As soon as the maximum number of guests is reached for the room, the display switches from the green "Go" to the red "Stop"

The learning factory project initially involved brainstorming and thus not only deciding which product to develop, but also how to manufacture it. The production process was first mapped virtually so that the individual processing steps on the machines could be planned. To this end, the individual components and workstations were also modeled using graphics software. A large part of the effort within the project was thus the development and planning of the production process, in which the students at the Faculty of Business and Economics were supported by their supervisors Prof. Dr. Birgit Ester, Prof. Dr. Florian Finsterwalder and Matthias Feiner, as well as in production by Steffen Bentz and Mostapha Bouyrakhen from DBK David + Baader GmbH, a medium-sized company for electronic and heating elements in Rülzheim, Palatinate.

To find out how great the demand is, who counts as potential customers and what features the product should have, the students also became active in market research. In addition, marketing and sales strategies cannot be missing. For this purpose, the students created an Instagram account and prepared posts for the future. In addition, they also participated in the design of "Stop & Go-vid19". The student "sales department" collected contact data from potential customers and the "finance department" created an initial cost calculation - now the entire team is eagerly awaiting the completion of the first Corona traffic light.