Mechatronics: Principles, Technologies and Applications

Mastering the finest art of ‘mechatronics’ currently looks one of the most attractive task of modern engineering technology and science. Many are the applications which resort to the interdisciplinary approach of mechatronics to enhance the performance, quality and safety of either product or process. Some are very traditional, like hard disk drives, biomedical, automotive and aerospace systems, other are fairly new like micro and nano electromechanical systems, unmanned air vehicles, intelligent machining and manufacturing systems or bioinspired devices. A first generation of mechatronic products was conceived to embed a suitable ‘smartness’ to improve the skill of self–adapting to any abrupt variation of operating conditions, by resorting to the ‘synergistic integration of mechanical engineering with electronics and control in the design and manufacturing of product process’ as mechatronics was brightly defined. Nowadays, a mechatronic design is surely based on its interdisciplinary nature, but its real meaning was harmonized with an effective contamination among different application domains, methodologies and technologies, being smartly applied to reach the highest result in any product, system and process development. A recent experience within the frame of the EMEA District of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) was a chance to get an impression of the scientific and industrial research activity performed in some fields of mechatronics. Some exciting examples describing how different competences, disciplines, technologies met in an innovative mechatronic system are herein exposed by some researchers of the EMEA area of the world. They deal with several domains, like the hard disk drive technology, biomedical prostheses, fluidic automation, UAV Vision System, vibration monitoring and suppression in steelmaking plants, materials machining and smart composites. These examples will narrate to the reader who is still looking for the meaning of mechatronics how some approaches, as neural network positioning control, chaos prevention, myoelectric stimulation of prosthesis, human detection by vision system, multi-physics modeling and control of dynamics are currently implemented in a sort of artificial intelligence in small scale device, as in a finger of a biotronic hand or in a large equipment like an electric arc furnace. Moreover, the reader will realize how intensively this goal is achieved by exploiting the available technologies as additive manufacturing or fiber optics embedded into composite structures to reduce the cost, weight or volume of the product or to improve the quality and accuracy of a material processing like in rolling or in turning against the risk of self–excited chatter vibration. This scenario is covering a wide range of mechatronic applications, although many others are currently developed in several fileds of engineering.