I-020

Mechatronics Capstone Design Projects at the University of Washington

Authors: William R. Murray and Joseph L. Garbini
Affiliation: University of Washington, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Abstract
The growth of mechatronics as an area of engineering over the last decade has generated a significant demand for mechatronics engineers. Being the synergistic combination of mechanical, electrical, and computer technologies in the design of complex products and processes, mechatronics is inherently multidisciplinary. Because mechatronics is relatively new and broadly multidisciplinary, the teaching of mechatronics is not well suited to the structure of the standard engineering curriculum, which has a highly disciplinary alignment. At the university level, successful mechatronics programs have emerged that can serve as models representing the various ways that mechatronics can be taught.

One such program at the undergraduate level is the multi-course guided curriculum in mechatronics that is available to students in their senior year in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Our mechatronics thread, or linked course sequence, is a sequence of five courses plus two technical electives. The culmination of this mechatronics thread is an intense, ten-week capstone design course in which students are organized into teams of three or four students each, with each team addressing a different significant, open-ended mechatronics project. Following a brief review of our mechatronics program as a whole, the curriculum into which it fits, and the individual constituent courses, described in this paper are our capstone design course and three typical projects from that course.

William R. Murray
University of Washington
Department of Mechanical Engineering
UW Box 352600
Seattle, Washington 98195-2600
murray@me.washington.edu