Mechatronics - Past, present and future

摘要

Summary form only given. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Mechatronics was born in Japan about 25 years ago which is an interdisciplinary area relating to the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering/electronics and computer science. This technology has produced many new products and provided powerful ways of improving the efficiency of the products we use in our daily life. Currently, there is no doubt about the importance of mechatronics as an area in science and technology. However, what is the unique technology of mechatronics seems to be unclear. Some people says that mechatronics is just the collection of the existing science and technology like mechanisms, actuators, electronics, computer technology, fuzzy control, artificial intelligence, miro-machine and so on, but has no original contents of technology. Currrently, several textbooks for mechatronics can be found in the world. Almost all these books seem to consist of several chapters, each of which summarizes the subject picked up from existing technologies. This structure makes people think that mechatronics has not a unique technology. Also, there is some confusion between mechatronics and some new areas closely relating to computer technology and electronics, robotics, micro-machines and so on. As long as we put the name of 'mnechatronic' on some area, mechatronics should have unique technology, or, in other words, it has the unique technology. In order to solve this problem, this talk will try to discuss what is the uniqueness of mechatronics which makes the difference from other relating technologies. This talk will point out that "mechatronics" is an application/need driven technology. The specific features of the mechatronic technology will be made by considering how to integrate the knowledge from several different areas like mechanics, electronics and computers in order to create new products satisfying social and/or consumer needs in the best way. The unique technology of mechatronics will be in the efforts of finding out the best solution to the required needs through efficiently combining several kinds of knowledge from different areas. It is not in each specific area which deals with mechanical-electrical systems, like robotics, fuzzy control and so on. In this talk the history of mechatronics advancement will be first addressed and what kinds of mechatronic products have so far been developed and what caused to create such mechatronic products will be discussed. Based on this consideration, what is the uniqueness of the mechatronic technology will be mentioned. Also, with this discussion in mind, what our future society needs is will be mentioned for the future direction of mechatronic technology. -4s the future needs, the problems caused by the limited energy resources on the earth and the elderly people society in 21st century will be suggested. To solve the problems, the talk will point out that human friendly and environment conscious technology in mechatronics, as called human friendly/environment conscious mechatronics, will be important and activate the advancement of the next generation mechatronics. .41so, several examples of future researches relating to this topics will be mentioned.