Mechatronics education systems through sensing and control design

Recently, many studies on mechatronics experiment system are conducted. In this paper, unique educational experiment systems are proposed for undergraduate students to be able to efficiently learn basic mechatronics techniques. The first system is used to learn input/output port operations, periodically LED lights ON/OFF and a stepping motor control. The second system is effective to learn A/D conversion for several sensor information, D/A conversion for DC motor control and a PID control method. Also, the third system is designed by using a robot arm with 4-DOFs to learn PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) control of a DC motor and force control of an end-effector. Further, the fourth system is designed using multiple mobile robots in which a subsumption control architecture is incorporated. Each of the systems individually has an important factor which students should acquire, so that it is expected that the combination will yield promising results. The effectiveness of the proposed systems is evaluated through experimental lectures in the department of mechanical engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Yamaguchi.