Mechatronics theme for imparting an interdisciplinary engineering education to undergraduate students is selected due to several reasons.
Mechatronics is an exciting, high-tech, and inherently interdisciplinary technology representing a growth industry with high demand for qualified graduates. The hands-on mechatronics and smart systems experiments can fuel students' imagination and provide an opportunity to reinforce and enhance their disciplinary skills.
- Measurement and control systems consisting of sensors, actuators, and physical plant provide an avenue for physics-based system modeling.
- Mechatronics prototype project development activities provide students invaluable systems integration experience wherein they learn
- to identify objectives from given problem specification;
- to determine variables to be sensed and manipulated;
- selection of and interface requirements for sensors, actuators, analog/digital electronics, and microcontroller hardware; and
- the design, model, simulate, analyze, refine, prototype, and validate cycle.
- Smart systems prototype project development activities enable students to apply optimization, signal processing, decision and control, fault diagnostic, etc., to produce smart products.
- Each skill learned in the sequence is valuable in it self, independent of others, and provides a foundation for applying a systems approach to problem solving.