Many electrical engineers may have just caught the buzz about a discipline called mechatronics, and have heard that it’s going to change their lives. There are good reasons why that’s likely to be the case, and I’ll go into them. But first, I’d like to make clear that many years of hard work have gone into making mechatronics an overnight success.
It was back in 1994 when the term “mechatronics” first came to my attention. Based on some initial research, I wrote an article entitled “Mecha—what?” to explain to EEs what was beginning to happen. In it, I stated that this new discipline was “the synergistic combination of precision mechanical engineering, electronic control, and systems thinking in the design of products and manufacturing processes.” Through no fault of my own, the statement became the official definition of mechatronics adopted by the Industrial Research and Development Advisory Committee of the European Community, and it still seems encapsulated the basic concepts behind mechatronics today.
One of the more difficult things for EEs to contend with was the idea that mechatronics was something really new. After all, we were already familiar with a lot of electromechanical devices: what engineer didn’t work with relays, solenoids, and hard-disk drives on a regular basis in 1994, and by then robots were already a common part of large assembly lines. But if you asked anyone who had actually been involved in designing these systems, they would tell you that the effort involved in trying to marry electronics and mechanical design in a single system was staggering.
That’s because two things were missing: 1) the average EE hadn’t thought about mechanical design since freshman year in college, and 2) there weren’t any tools that would bridge the two worlds and provide a common “language” for exchanging technical data.
Fortunately, a lot has changed in the intervening 13 years. People like Martin Grimheden and Mats Hanson at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, started to put the teaching of this interdisciplinary subject on a solid didactic footing. So today engineers can find courses in mechatronics in major engineering schools, and thus graduate into industry with a solid understanding of how to apply the discipline’s techniques to real world problems.
With regard to tools, when I attended NI Week this past August, I was pleased to find many of the show’s sessions addressing the application of new mechatronics tools to system design and, on the exhibition floor, many examples of systems designed with those tools.
It was also made clear to me on the exhibition floor why EEs need to be familiar with mechatronics. It’s because the success of the latest gee-whiz electronic products that were present there—things like Wii controllers and semi-autonomous personal robots—depends on providing a new and highly reliable user-experience that results from the seamless integration of mechanical and electronic subsystems. It’s what the public’s come to expect, and what only mechatronics can reliably deliver.
Richard Comerford, Editor
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