Mechatronic System Integration for Senior Students

This paper describes the design and implementation of a senior level course in mechatronic system integration for students completing a mechatronics engineering option in mechanical engineering. The course is designed to give students theoretical and practical experience with a large-scale mechatronic system, and a variety of control, sensing and actuating architectures. The lecture component of the course introduces students to large-scale project integration and interface design, as well as system architecture design. Students learn about alternative control hardware platforms commonly used in industry, such as motion control hardware, field programmable gate arrays and programmable logic controllers. The selection and system integration of various industrial sensors, including vision, are presented. Students also learn about networked control and discrete event control approaches for large-scale industrial systems. The course contains a significant practical laboratory component. In a series of laboratory sessions, students develop and implement subsystems of a part sorting machine, culminating in the integration and demonstration of an automated, autonomous, sensor driven electro-mechanical system for sorting randomly delivered parts. The course offers students a theoretical background as well as significant practical experience with large scale mechatronics systems, as would be encountered in industry. This paper describes the lecture and laboratory content, and the experiences from the first offering of the course. INTRODUCTION As defined by Centikunt [1], mechatronics “consists of the synergistic integration of three distinct traditional engineering fields for the system level design process. These fields are: (1) Mechanical Engineering, where the word ‘mecha’ is taken from, (2) Electrical or electronics engineering, where the part of the word ‘tronics’ is taken from, and (3) computer science.” The field of mechatronics education has been expanding rapidly over the last twenty years. Over that time, mechatronics education has evolved and expanded across the world [2, 3]. The offered programs have evolved from multi-disciplinary course offerings, through specialized course development to specialized mechatronics curricula development, both in undergraduate and graduate programs [3]. At the University of British Columbia, a mechatronics (electro-mech) program has been offered since 1994 [4]. The program was initially designed as a multi-disciplinary program, where students based in mechanical engineering took additional courses in electrical engineering and computer science. The program has recently been re-designed to allow for expansion, and to include additional new specialized mechatronics courses. A problem with a purely multi-disciplinary approach, where students take existing courses from the mechatronics subdisciplines, is that students do not learn about mechatronic systems, i.e., how to integrate the various mechanical, electrical and software components comprising a mechatronic system, and do not learn about system wide design trade-offs and interface design. To address this issue, a series of new courses was developed for the mechatronic program: a third year course on system modeling (MECH 366), and three fourth year courses covering: sensors and actuators (MECH 420), digital control (MECH 467), and mechatronic system instrumentation (MECH 421). This paper describes the mechatronic system instrumentation and integration course (MECH 421). The goal of this course is to give students theoretical and practical experience with large-scale mechatronic system integration, using a variety of control, sensing and actuating architectures