1. Introduction to Mechatronics

INTRODUCTION
What is Mechatronics?
Mechatronics is the complete integration or adoption of electrical, electronics, computer technology information technology and control engineering with mechanical engineering.
Mechatronics plays a crucial a role in the design, manufacturing and maintenance of a wide range of engineering products and processes. As a consequence of this it has become necessary for engineers and technicians to have skills and knowledge that are not confined to a particular field or area of specilization.
Automation and control methods adopting integrated approach to technology has become relevant to industries, machineries and consumer engineering products. Mechatronics is an enabling discipline, has emerged to cater to the need of sophistication and flexibility in the system, and in fact has become a preferred choice for the current generation for real-time automation and control solutions in place of traditional systems. Most of the domestic equipments like washing machines, automatic cameras, digital cameras are a few examples of Mechatronics system which we use without bothering to know the technology adopted in it.
Productivity and quality level of many mechanical products and mechanical systems have considerably improved in the recent years, thanks to Mechatronics.
Multi disciplinary scenario
Multi disciplinary systems are not new; they have been successfully designed and used for many years. One of the most common is the electromechanical system which often uses a computer algorithm to modify the behavior of a mechanical system. Electronics are used to transduce information between the computer science and mechanical discipline.
Multi - disciplinary system employs a sequential design-by-discipline approach. For example in the design of electromechanical system three stages of designs were adopted. They are design of mechanical system, design of microelectronic system and control system. Each design application was after the completion of the previous one. The major draw back of design by discipline approach is fixing the design at various stages in the sequence which resulted in new constraints from the design upto that stage. These new constraints would make the other design to exhibit poor performance and fail to meet the new constraints. The error are costly to repair, major source of problem in the inherently complex nature of design. The solution to this is Mechatronics approach to system design which offers solution to the problems of sequential designing by applying concurrent engineering.