So to continue the thought process, motion control as a subset of the field of mechatronics is the intersection of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Two very diverse disciplines with totally different areas of concerns and parameters of what is important.
The intersection of the two fields might be a very narrow slice of the engineering disciplines, but in practice it doesn’t work out that way. The electronics domain requires knowlege in control, power device implementation, sophisticated protection schemes, and lately, communications protocols that are increasingly required in factory automation settings. Mechanical engineers must deal with load, mass, friction, acceleration and all the related enviromental conditions required for a given product to be successful.
In the end, the intellectual examination reveals another interesting lesson. Experience counts. A lot. And it is enigmatic at the same time, because I don’t know how you capture this most human quality of accumulating a variety of seemingly unrelated experiences and being able to integrate them into a meaningful whole. But there it is.
Experienced motion control people are the industry’s biggest asset. It takes many times more effort to develop high quality applications or products without experienced people. The learning curve takes too long. Many companies re-create that learning curve and miss the window for getting to market with something excellent that moves their us all forward. Spending too much time or money can wreak havoc with new product introductions and make some products too expensive to be sustainable.
An interesting contradiction is the growing complexity of setup and diagnostic software for AC drives and starters, when, at the same time servo drive designers are trying to simplify their products for “Ease of Use”. In principle, all three product domains serve three phase electric motors. One intelligent starter I recently reviewed had 168 parameters that had to be configured in order for the starter to operate. AC Drives have had close to 500 parameters. Why are the servo products migrating to greater simplicity and the other products to greater complexity? Are we attempting to collect some “added value” by making things complex, and at the same time adding value to other products by making them “easy to use”, i.e. – less complex?
So how do we make the mechatronic design cycle more effective? Many colleges are offering mechatronic tracks of study in their engineering departments. Foundations like First Robotics Competition are bringing the challenge to students who have never built a robot before. These programs bring young minds together with more experienced people and offers a means of transferring a great wealth of knowledge to a new group of people who will advance the field in just a few years.
But is “Motion Made Easy” contradictory to the natural complexity of the field? The connection is Experience. Experience is what makes the hard stuff easy and the really impossible stuff do-able. So again I will say, if you haven’t done motion control projects before, be cautious, it may not be as easy as you think. And check around for someone with more experience with solving the problem you are after. You might find that the “better, cheaper, faster” solution is possible, with a little help from a qualified expert.
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