A personal view of the early days of mechatronics in relation to aerospace

Abstract

The danger has always been that mechatronics is seen by industry as an academic concept and the aim here is to provide a then practicing engineer's view on the early days of mechatronics from the perspective of the UK aerospace industry. As someone who personally became involved with mechatronics as the concept was itself developing, it was unclear as to where the division lay between the two disciplines of systems and mechatronics. The passage of time did little to improve the situation and within the aerospace industry, there was little interest in mechatronics. In fact, it was seen by many as an irrelevance and a distraction from the key engineering tasks at hand. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London.