Industrial Motion Control as a Context for Mechatronics Education

Many mechanical engineering programs around the country have mechatronics courses in their curricula. Over the past decade the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) community has made significant advances in developing educational materials and laboratory exercises in mechatronics. However, there is a gap remaining in the curricula. Academic programs are heavily oriented towards control theory, board-level electronics, interfacing and microprocessors supplemented with laboratory equipment, such as the inverted pendulum and LEGO robots. 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 an overview of a new modular curriculum we are designing by partnering with industry to “teach the fundamentals”, but in the context of industrial motion control technology and multi-axis machines. We also provide details of one of its modules along with assessment results and feedback from students.