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Book Review
Mechatronics, Principles and Applications, by Godfrey C. Onwubolu, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 2005. ISBN 0 7506 6379 0
The first response a seasoned engineer might have to a text with this title might be: “What in the heck is Mechatronics?” And his first answer might be: “It is just a made up name to cover things we already know.” Well, there is some truth to that, but the author’s goal for this text is to try to go beyond the underlying engineering disciplines that make up Mechatronics and focus on the system level thinking that allows them to be bound together in a good system design.
There are many definitions of Mechatronics in the literature. The author uses a definition coined by the editors of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics:
The synergistic combination of precision mechanical engineering, electronic control, and systems thinking in the design of products and manufacturing processes.
Based on this definition, the author defines the key Mechatronics disciplines as: Electronics, Control, Sensors and Actuators (mechanical systems), and Computation/Information technology. The core of this text attempts to lay the foundations of each of these areas at a college undergraduate level. Needless to say, covering any of these disciplines in depth would require a full text, so the presentations here are overviews. It is not clear how useful this really is for an undergraduate student without previous training in engineering fundamentals. But for a seasoned engineer who is trying to expand his or her perspective beyond their core discipline, this level of treatment can be a useful starting point.
Not all the key Mechatronics disciplines are covered equally in this text. The author spends about 25% of the text on a relatively solid overview of classical control. On the other hand, there is no treatment of digital control techniques, which seems surprising given the goal of designing Mechatronic systems with digital computation at their core. The chapter on interfacing microcontrollers and actuators is very short and cookbook like.
About 40% of the book is a review of circuit theory, analog circuits, and digital circuits. This material is covered in 200 pages in the form of a high level overview. The coverage is not bad, but some key areas are not addressed. For example, there is no discussion of noise. The section on Microcontrollers is more specific and focuses on the PIC16F84 microcontroller as a typical device. In addition there is a short chapter on data acquisition.
The sections on sensors, actuators, and mechanical mechanisms are again idealized overviews. However, for someone with an electronics background, they would provide useful background. There is also a chapter on reliability containing material which is difficult to find in overview form. For example, the chapter presents the Weibull failure rate model, which is often used for IC reliability.
There is a final chapter on case studies. The previous chapters covering the Mechatronics disciplines fail, in my opinion, to really connect these disciplines with system level design thinking. So, I was looking for the case studies to focus on this level of design interaction. Unfortunately, they do not. They are much too brief. And they are much more like college problem-set problems that real product case studies. The author should have used real products as case studies where real system design trade-offs could have been highlighted.
In summary, I see one use for this text: for someone with good engineering fundamentals in a focused area of expertise, this text can supply a broad overview of the other disciplines that make up a multidisciplinary electromechanical system. Such an overview can be useful in itself, or can be a starting point for further study.
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