  Quantum heat engines are modeled by thermodynamic cycles with
quantum-mechanical working media. Since high engine efficiencies require
adiabaticity, a major challenge is to yield a nonvanishing power output at
finite cycle times. Shortcuts to adiabaticity using counter-diabatic (CD)
driving may serve as a means to speed up such, otherwise infinitely long,
cycles. We introduce local approximate CD protocols for many-body spin quantum
heat engines and show that this method improves the efficiency and power for
finite cycle times considerably. The protocol does not require a priori
knowledge of the system eigenstates and is thus realistic in experiments.
