New Mechatronics Curriculum on Multi-axis Industrial Motion Control

Over the past couple decades, mechanical engineering programs have made significant advances in developing educational materials and laboratory exercises in controls and mechatronics1-4. However, there is an important gap remaining between the academic programs and the needs of the graduates and industry. The academic programs are heavily oriented towards control theory, board-level electronics, interfacing and microprocessors supplemented with laboratory equipment, such as the inverted pendulum, and projects, such as Lego robots5-7. But industrial applications require mechanical engineers to design machines with multiple axes that execute complex, high speed, high precision coordinated motion using sophisticated motion controllers. In this paper, we present overview of a new course and its laboratory developed in partnership with industry. The course aims to teach "the fundamentals" while focusing on industrial motion control technology and multi-axis machines. The course was offered for the first time in its new format in Fall 2013. Assessment results for one module are presented and discussed. This project was funded by a grant from the NSF-TUES program.