This book is intended for both mechanical and electronics engineers (researchers and graduate students) who wish to get some training in smart electronics devices embedded in mechanical systems. The book is partly a textbook and partly a monograph. It is a textbook as it provides a focused interdisciplinary experience for undergraduates that encompass important elements from traditional courses as well as contemporary developments in Mechtronics. It is simultaneously a monograph because it presents several new results and ideas and further developments and explanation of existing algorithms which are brought together and published in the book for the first time.

Intro to Mechatronics - lecture by Professor Vikram Kapila, New York University Mechatronics Defined Mechatronics: Working Definition for us Product Realization Paradigm Disciplinary Foundations of Mechatronics Multi-/Cross-/Inter-Disciplinary Sequential/Concurrent Product Realization Mechatronics-based Product Realization Mechatronic Design Process

Mechatronics is the synergistic blend of mechanics, electronics, and computer science. This book is concerned with applications of mechatronic systems in various fields, like robotics, medical and assistive technology, human-machine interaction, unmanned vehicles, manufacturing, and education.

The book presents an excellent overview of the recent developments in the different areas of Robotics, Automation and Control. Through its 24 chapters, this book presents topics related to control and robot design; it also introduces new mathematical tools and techniques devoted to improve the system modeling and control. An important point is the use of rational agents and heuristic techniques to cope with the computational complexity required for controlling complex systems. Through this book, we also find navigation and vision algorithms, automatic handwritten comprehension and speech recognition systems that will be included in the next generation of productive systems developed by man.

Numerous books have already been published specializing in one of the well known areas that comprise Mechatronics: mechanical engineering, electronic control and systems. The goal of this book is to collect state-of-the-art contributions that discuss recent developments which show a more coherent synergistic integration between the mentioned areas. The book is divided in three sections. The first section, divided into five chapters, deals with Automatic Control and Artificial Intelligence. The second section discusses Robotics and Vision with six chapters, and the third section considers Other Applications and Theory with two chapters.