State-of-the-art in rapid prototyping for mechatronic systems

This paper will give an overview of state-of-the-art rapid prototyping techniques for mechatronic systems and their enabling technologies. After presenting a taxonomy for the plethora of existing approaches some example prototyping systems and case studies are discussed. With this, the benefits of the emerging new class of system-level prototyping approaches as efficient validation methods for the growing microelectronic part of future mechatronic systems which have to cope with increasing complexity and tighter time-to-market constraints should be pointed out. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.