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.