Mechatronics at the Engineering School of the University of Bergamo

During the last years, Mechatronics had an interesting development at the University of Bergamo becoming a curriculum both of the MSc course in Mechanical Engineering and of the MSc course in Computer Science Engineering of the School of Engineering. Among the courses included in the syllabus of the Mechatronics curriculum, the core one is "Mechatronic systems II", a 6 ECTS course delivered to students during the fourth semester. The main educational goal of the course is to provide principles and methods for the design of mechatronic systems. Besides the theoretical lectures, the course has also a large laboratory part dedicated to experimental activities on which the theoretical part finds its application. Students have to develop specific projects as inverted pendulum control, inverted pendulum tracking by means of a commercial camera, 1 dof linear haptic interface, visual servoing for the position control of a one degree of freedom mechanical system. The present paper describes the approach used at the University of Bergamo to teach Mechatronics with particular reference to the different projects assigned to the students, the steps to be followed for their development (modelling, simulation, control definition, test), the experimental validation, and the results obtained by the students in terms of increased knowledge on mechatronic systems.