1. Introduction
Automation technology is widely used in many fields including industry, agriculture,aerospace and national defense. The specialty of automation has a long history, strong faculty force, and superior teaching facilities. The discipline has gained many honors and titles, such as national distinguished teachers and national excellentteaching teams. The faculty advocates the student-centered teaching philosophy and has built a set of practical education system for training system designers.The discipline focuses on the following four research areas: motion control systems, process control systems, network control systems, and embedded control systems.The discipline has several national and provincial essence courses, a national bilingual teaching demonstration course, and a provincial automation experimental teaching demonstration center which plays a great role in the cultivation of students’ scientific literacy and innovation capabilities. The undergraduates have won more than twenty outstanding awards, first-place awards and second-place awards in various national undergraduate competitions, such as the Challenge Cup National Undergraduate Curricular Academic Science and Technology Works Competition, the Industrial Automation Challenge Contest, the National Undergraduate Intelligent Car Contest, the Chinese Robot Contest, and the National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest. The graduates can undertake system design, product manufacture, and software/hardware development in automatic filed. They possess strong practical ability and can adapt to the needs of the society. The employment rate of the past three years exceeded 99% and over 60% of the graduates were admitted to various universities for further study.
