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What is the ideal background for a mechatronics engineer?
June 9, 2008

Mechatronics is a cross-disciplinary system-level discipline. So, a mechatronics engineer needs a very broad technical background as well as communication and interpersonal skills.

The term system-level gets bandied about a lot, but I’m not too sure how many engineers have a good working definition of it. I came across my favorite definition long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away during a brief stint as a business systems analyst at Dupont. I snagged a book out of the department library, which I remember being Fundamentals of Systems Analysis by Jerry Fitzgerald.

The definition (as I remember it) took a Zen approach by explaining what systems weren’t. It pointed out that physics deals with situations that have very few elements, like a ball rolling down an inclined plane or a mass attached to a spring. Statistical mechanics deals with situations characterized by enormous numbers of elements. Systems fall in between. They have too many elements to analyze efficiently the simple differential equations physicists love, but not enough elements to analyze statistically. So, system analysis needs a hybrid approach that involves solving many differential equations simultaneously to model situations with many degrees of freedom.

Mechatronic systems add the complication that some of the elements are mechanical, some are electrical, some involve information technology (IT), and all interact with each other via control loops. This is its multi-disciplinary side, and a mechatronics engineer needs familiarity with all disciplines, as well as an IT background to keep it all organized.

Taking a mechatronic system from specification of needs to deployment in the field generally requires too many disciplines for any one individual to do well. This means the mechatronics engineer needs a project management background as well. The projects are small compared to, say, building the Sears Tower, but there are still a lot of balls to juggle.

But, managing a mechatronics project takes more than milestones and Gantt charts. Deliverables for all the tasks in the Gantt chart have to be tightly integrated and optimized for overall system performance, not individual performance.

In other words, the mechanical designer wants to make the mechanical portion work well as a mechanical system, while the computer designer wants the embedded single-board computer optimized to do its thing. Optimizing either is irrelevant from a mechatronics point of view, however. The only thing that counts is how well the overall system works when assembled. There is every reason to expect that the mechanical portion of the optimum overall system will not be optimum on its own. It is the mechatronics engineer who must understand this and make it happen.

That is why the mechatronics engineer needs communication and interpersonal skills — to guide disparate team members into behaving differently than they might individually.

To sum up, the mechatronics engineer needs a background that includes project management, applied mathematics, computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical/electronic engineering, and any other scientific or technical disciplines required for the project, such as fluid mechanics for an aviation-related project, or chemistry for an environmental project.

Such individuals do exist, but they buck the trend seen over the past decade or so of increasing specialization.

Also see:
The Culinary Art of Mechatronics
MechatronicsZone road show kicks off
New mechatronics videos on CEtv 
Challenge: Mechatronics products, here's help

Posted by Charlie Masi on June 9, 2008 | Comments (2)