The Mechatronics Hall — EEA's 800 m² flagship engineering laboratory — was inaugurated on Thursday in a small ceremony attended by founding faculty, current undergraduates, and representatives from KUKA Robotics Hellas, the German robotics manufacturer that supplied six collaborative robots to the facility.
Located in Building B of the Peania campus, the Hall has been operational on a soft-launch basis since February 2026 but has now received final occupancy and safety certification from the East Attica regional authority. With this, the space is open to all undergraduate students in the Mechanical Engineering and Computer Engineering programmes, with structured workshop slots through the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
What's inside
- Six KUKA LBR iiwa collaborative robotic arms, with three additional cells for industrial robot programming exercises.
- Additive manufacturing area with twelve fused-deposition printers, three resin printers, and one industrial-grade Markforged X7 carbon-fibre printer.
- A small-scale (1 × 1 m test section) low-speed wind tunnel for undergraduate aerodynamics labs.
- Two single-cylinder propulsion test cells, with mechanical and instrumentation upgrade scheduled for late 2026.
- A CNC machining bay (two 3-axis mills and one CNC lathe) for prototype fabrication.
- Open-plan project area equipped to host the Daedalus Society Solar Boat build.
"What this facility lets us do is teach engineering the way engineering is actually practised," said Prof. Nikos Mavrogiannis, Dean of Mechanical Engineering. "Our second-year mechatronics module already runs entirely as a project-based course in this hall. Our students leave it knowing how to design, build and debug a real system, not just analyse it on paper."
Open to students from all departments
Although the Mechatronics Hall is administered by the Department of Mechanical Engineering, structured workshop access is available to any EEA undergraduate after completing the half-day mandatory safety induction. The next induction sessions are scheduled for 26 May, 9 June and 23 June. Bookings are made through the student portal.