The word mechatronics was first coined by a senior engineer of a Japanese company; Yaskawa, in 1969, as a combination of

"mecha" of mechanisms and "tronics" of electronics. The word has taken a wider meaning since then and is now widely being

used as a technical jargon to describe a philosophy in engineering technology, more than the technology itself. For this wider
concept of mechatronics, a number of definitions has been proposed in the literature, differing in the particular characteristics

that the definition is intended to emphasize. The most commonly used one emphasizes synergy:

Mechatronics is the synergistic integration of mechanical engineering with electronics and intelligent computer control in the
design and manufacturing of products and processes.

Mechatronics is an interdisciplinary branch of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering that is

concerned with integrating electrical and mechanical engineering to create hybrid systems. In this way, machines can be
automated through the use of electric motors, servo-mechanisms, and other electrical systems in conjunction with special

software. A common example of a mechatronics system is a CD-ROM drive. Mechanical systems open and close the drive, spin
the CD and move the laser, while an optical system reads the data on the CD and converts it to bits. Integrated software

controls the process and communicates the contents of the CD to the computer.

Mechatronics is currently used in the following areas of engineering:

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Automation, and in the area of robotics.

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Servo-Mechanics

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Sensing and Control Systems

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Automotive engineering, in the design of subsystems such as anti-lock braking systems

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Computer engineering, in the design of mechanisms such as hard drives, CD-ROM drives, etc.

The development of mechatronics has gone through three stages.

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The first stage corresponds to the years around the introduction of the word. During this stage, technologies used in

mechatronics systems developed rather independently of each other and individually.

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With the start of the eighties, a synergistic integration of different technologies started taking place, the notable example

being in optoelectronics (i.e. an integration of optics and electronics). The concept of hardware/software co-design also
started in these years.

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The third and the last stage can also be considered as the start of the mechatronics age and starts with the early
nineties. The most notable aspect of the third stage is the increased use of computational intelligence in mechatronic

products and systems. It is due to this development that we can now talk about Machine Intelligence Quotient (MIQ).

Another important development in the third stage is the possibility of miniaturization of the components; in the form of
microactuators and microsensors (i.e. micromechatronics).

Fig. 1. The architecture of a mechatronic system

A mechatronics system has two main components as shown in Fig. 1. The controlled system is the mechanical process that is in
contact with the world with all of its sensors and actuators. The distinguishing features of a mechatronic system from other

systems are the three sub-systems of the controlling system used for perception, knowledge representation and planning and

control. The intelligence is usually embedded in the planning and control sub-system. Here, based on the information gathered
from the sensors, computational intelligence methodologies are exploited to plan a course of action that will enable the

controlled system to achieve the given tasks. Conventional microprocessors, artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic and
probabilistic reasoning are among the tools used in the sub-system for information processing and decision making.

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