Curriculum,equipment and student project outcomes for mechatronics education in the core mechanical engineering program at Kettering University

Following an NSF grant in 1997 to develop undergraduate mechatronics laboratories and courses, two senior-level elective courses were introduced in the mechanical engineering curriculum at Kettering University. The student popularity of the subject, and relevance to graduating mechanical engineers soon made it clear that mechatronics education belonged to the core curriculum at Kettering. To integrate mechatronics into the mechanical engineering core, two existing sophomore-level courses were redesigned to include significant educational experiences in mechatronics design and prototype fabrication. Introduction to Design (ME-203) previously featured a 6-week student project in which teams of students would design and build an electromechanical device to accomplish functionality defined in design constraints provided by the professor. However, these devices were not mechatronic in nature. In the revised course, the objective is to evolve these designs to utilize embedded microcontrollers, sensors and actuators and achieve much more sophisticated functionality. To accommodate the anticipated increase in time required to complete such projects, the existing sophomore course Instrumentation (ME-204) was revised to incorporate learning objectives from the senior-level mechatronics elective courses. Further, 6 weeks of laboratory time from Instrumentation could then be dedicated to the aforementioned mechatronic projects. As such, both ME-203 and ME-204 have been integrated to form an eight-credit “Introduction to Mechatronics Design” course. This paper details the scope of this course, the specialized equipment developed for it and student project outcomes.