A VERSATILE PLATFORM FOR TEACHING MECHATRONICS

Mechatronics courses typically include a project which allows the students to integrate and apply their knowledge in the design, construction and testing of a real mechatronic system. At one extreme, these projects can be free-form. The students think of an original device and then deal with all aspects of engineering development from parts procurement to final testing of the full-up system. At the other end of the spectrum students are given prebuilt systems and must program them to perform certain task(s). These often take the form of small mobile robots that are run in a contest of some sort at the end of the semester. Both approaches have their merits and drawbacks. Free-form projects permit the most creativity but require more time consuming tasks such as parts procurement and detailed parts fabrication that are at the margin of the core subject matter of the course. Use of premade machines or kits removes many of the tedious and peripheral tasks and permits the students to focus more on the programming, control and testing aspects of the project. However, there is a danger that such a set-piece project becomes "cookbook" with known, well-defined outcomes and the students' experiences with fault-finding, debugging and design iteration may be minimal. This paper presents a middleground approach that seeks a compromise between free-form and set-piece projects to maximize exposure to core mechatronics concepts while minimizing peripheral tasks and, importantly, preserving a good measure of creativity. Students in the author's mechatronics class were given premade motorized XYZ platforms and challenged to "do something" with the machines for their final projects. While the basic platform is prebuilt it is of such general nature as to permits a wide range of original projects. The results of one semester of this new course design will be presented and compared with the author's earlier experience teaching the same course but with a required free-form final project.