My first brush with Mechatronics came courtesy of White Sands Missile Range

Imagine a missile launch,” my boss explained. “It comes out of the silo without warning, goes like a streak, and sometimes explodes on launch. We want an unmanned tracking mount that will sit close to the launch area, pick up the missile, and track it — no matter what.”

The engineering assignment was pure Mechatronics. Make the mechanical pieces strong but light enough for the accelerations and slew rates to come. Give the drives enough power, speed, and responsiveness. Make sure the sensors could pick up the bird, lock on it and follow it to the death. Fashion controls that would tie it all together and make it all work.

It was, in short, classic Mechatronics, though we never used that word. It would be two years later, in 1969, before Tetsuro Mori, a senior engineer at Yaskawa, coined it. But how the practice of Mechatronics, and the engineering disciplines it uses, have grown in the years since then. Read more