What is mechatronics and why teach it?

Mechatronics has developed in the UK from the mid-1980s to the point where there are currently some 42, three-year and four-year undergraduate courses at 27 UK institutions which involve mechatronics in some way in their title, the distribution being as in Table 1.1 There are also many mechatronics-based programmes and courses around the world, including relatively recent developments in countries such as those in Southern Africa, New Zealand, Lithuania, Hungary, Colombia and Switzerland.2-6 Additionally, there are growing numbers of international conferences supported, among others, by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Mechatronics Forum.7-11 These conferences are supplemented by technical journals having mechatronics as their subject area.12,13

However, and despite this world-wide interest in mechatronics, it is still not certain that there is a clear and consistent understanding of what mechatronics is and how, and at what level, it should be taught. A review of the literature about mechatronics will rapidly result in a number of definitions, each of which perhaps seeks to emphasise a slightly different aspect of the mechatronics concept, ranging from design to precision engineering and from sensors to actuators.14,15 Nevertheless, and despite their difference in emphasis, most of the definitions do manage to agree in some way that mechatronics is concerned with the integration of its core technologies to generate new and novel technological solutions in the form of products and systems in which functionality is integrated across those core technologies, with information technology and software engineering then providing the 'glue' which binds the whole together. This integration is also reflected in the various diagrammatic forms that have been used to represent the structure of a mechatronic system, as is seen from the two examples of Fig. 1.