Engineering – Mechatronic

We meet once again, ladies and gentlemen. Oh yeah, another holiday just in time to give me a-seventh-heaven rest out of the hectic life of a college student. Relief, huh? Refering to the title now, all of you must be wondering the details and history of engineering that set the course of human development in applying physics in our daily life (do you?). (Whatever) Actually, I’m writing this because recently, there was a Robo-Fair 2009 held in Cineleisure which kind of interesting in terms of the achievement of university student in mastering that field. Well, let’s get started for our topic!

If I’m not mistaken, engineering comes from the word engine which originates from the Latin word, ingenium that defines as “innate quality, especially mental power, hence a clever invention.” The history of this field set back as early as Archimedes era which he designed a number of inventions that obey the rule of physics. Before him, Imhotep was the first civil engineer who designed the Great Pyramid. Now, as the era of modernization is taking place all over the place, a lot of branches of engineering are made to sustain the need of human being. For instance, there are electrical & electronic engineering (E & E), computer engineering, material engineering, molecular engineering and latest, robotic engineering (my favourite!!!).

Now, I would like to narrow down the scope of engineering to my cup of tea. You see, mechatronic engineering or also known as robotic engineering is the combination of mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and computer engineering. This field is quite new and has the toughest challenge within it because the engineer have to build a machine or the lament term, a robot to somehow adapt to the targeted environment and simultaneously fulfill the objective of its creation. Simple you say? Nah, actually, engineers have to corporate and achieve consensus with others in order to produce the most optimum robot in the most aspects such as material used, programmes, features of the robot and so on.

As for robots, they have to posess 3 things in common; input (sensors), body and output (reaction). Lack of one of these, they can’t categorized themselves as what they are. The word robot was derived to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921. The robots, sooner or later, were heavily used in industrial factory to replace the manpower to increase the efficiency of line production such as automobile installation. In present, the researchers are focused more on constructing humanoid, or simply a robot with human characteristics on it. This is because they can be used in giving out service to human as a maid who can clean, wash or cook. If you can’t get it, it’s just like the I Robot (which at the end, the robots rebel and fought against human for their freedom). To know more about this field, please feel free to surf the net or specifically Wikipedia. Hmm, I think that’s all in my mind. Catch up the next chapter of my discussion, ya? See ya!