History of Mechatronics

Keywords Electrical engineering Electronics Computer engineering Robotics Magnetism Smart sensors Automated guided vehicles 

Mechatronics is the synergetic integration of mechanical engineering with electrical engineering and/or electronics and possibly with other disciplines for the purposes of design, manufacture, operation, and maintenance of a product 

The term synergetic is very important in the definition. It indicates a concurrent and cooperative approach of various disciplines. 

In this chapter, the growth of mechatronics starting from 1970s will be discussed. For the ease of understanding of the developments in mechatronics, brief histories of electrical and electronics engineering are also presented. Finally, the future trends are discussed. 

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In this chapter, a brief history of the emergence of mechatronics is presented. As the root of mechatronics lies in electrical engineering and electronics engineering, significant developments in these two core engineering disciplines are also highlighted. New innovations in mechatronics, future perspectives, and their possible application for improving quality of product, process, and service are briefly discussed. 

The visualization of function dependabilities of mechatronical system in an appropriate way can be used for mapping the relations to matrix-oriented relations. Determination of system architecture and reliability analysis for system composed of simple hardware with known fault histories or elaborately discussed in many literatures. But when a system is based on software or more complex hardware components, describing of the system architecture, and its reliability will be challenging. However, in such cases, determination of system architecture at a reasonable level seems to be inevitable during design phase. Once the system architecture is available in an appropriate mathematical form, reliability evaluation of the system is possible. After finishing this step the considered modules can be defined as atomic blocks/units. By means of the defined blocks it is possible to describe the whole system functionality in a suitable reliability-oriented manner. 

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