[PDF] Mechatronics. Principles, Technologies and Applications

A recent experience within the frame of the EMEA (Europe – Middle East and Africa) District of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) encouraged me to actively participate to this editorial project whose aim is giving an impression of some current topics in mechatronics, being subject of several research activities and of industrial efforts focused
on a continuous innovation of product, process and professional expertise. As the Reader could realize the Authors replied to a call from the Mediterranean area and Africa, obviously without any inhibition to collaborate with other institutions outside the EMEA region. They
propose herein an overview of applications, methodologies and technologies which are nowadays characterizing the ongoing activity within the field of mechatronics. Those issues are a little bit melt inside each chapter, since in everyone some item related to a specific application, technology and method used in designing, controlling and manufacturing the system is described. Actually those details assure the originality of each contribution herein enclosed, as the Authors wrote.

To present the result of this effort a common understanding about the meaning of mechatronics is required, because it is well known that a number of definitions was worldwide proposed. After more than thirty years, the interpretation of mechatronics written by Bradley and Dawson (1991) as ―the synergistic combination of precision mechanical
engineering, electronic control and systems thinking in the design of products and processes‖ still brightly and shortly describes some essential properties of systems designed and manufactured by following the so–called mechatronic approach. As that sentence states typical nature of mechatronics is to be inter–disciplinary, since all the technical competences
of engineering, computer and material sciences cooperate to design a unique product which includes and exploits some artificial intelligence or simply smartness. This one is usually associated to the system capability of perceiving any abrupt variation of the operating conditions and to its skill of self–adapting, through a suitable control action which modifies its own configuration.