Abstract

Smart sensing and perception with the abilities to measure system parameters, monitor system status and interpret surroundings/environment for mechatronic systems play critical roles for mechatronic systems. With the developments of some emerging applications, such as intelligent manufacturing, human-machine interface and biomechatronics, new requirements and expectations for the sensing systems are more and more challenging, such as high accuracy and bandwidth, high fault tolerance, multipurpose, intelligentization, modularization, biocompatibility. For instance, Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) composite widely used for safety-critical applications, such as aircraft and marine, requires new non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques for structural health monitoring. Sensing systems with the characteristics of noncontact, low-cost, high accuracy and bandwidth are desired when recognizing human body posture for the design of wearable mechatronic systems and human-machine interface. Many invisible and unmeasurable or hard-to-measure physical fields in three-dimensional space are needed to be estimated in real time for many engineering applications, such as strain, stress and temperature fields inside workpieces when monitoring and controlling manufacturing process, magnetic fields of the air gap and eddy current fields inside the iron cores when designing and optimizing actuators.

This workshop aims at bringing mechatronic researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss emerging fundamental issues in smart sensing and perception from perspectives over a wide spectrum of applications, such as structural monitoring for new materials, human-machine interface, field reconstruction and perception and manufacturing process monitoring. This Workshop will discuss recent advances, challenges and opportunities in sensing system modeling, designing and implementation, which will move forward new and emerging technologies in mechatronic systems with more and more ‘smart and intelligent functions’. Both hardware innovations and methodology developments will be presented, balancing theoretical analysis and modeling with experimental demonstrations and discussions. This workshop will help better understand the fundamental concepts and theories in formulating sensing problems and determine the major challenges for future sensing and perception of mechatronic systems, as well as identify key technologies for meeting these challenges.