Managing Complex Mechatronics R&D: A Systems Design Approach

To compress research and development (R&D) cycle times of high-tech mechatronic products with conformance performance metrics, managing R&D projects to allow engineers from electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing disciplines receive real-time design feedback and assessment are essential. In this paper, we propose a systems design procedure to integrate mechanical design, structure prototyping, and servo evaluation through careful comprehension of the servo-mechanical-prototype production cycle commonly employed in mechatronic industries. Our approach focuses on the Modal Parametric Identification of key feedback parameters for fast exchange of design specifications and information. This enables efficient conduct of product design evaluations, and supports schedule compression of the R&D project life cycle in the highly competitive consumer electronics industry. Using the commercial hard disk drive as a case example, we demonstrate how our approach allow inter-disciplinary specifications to be communicated among engineers from different backgrounds to speed up the R&D process for the next generation of intelligent manufacturing. This provides the management of technology team with powerful decision-making tools for project strategy formulation, and improvements in project outcome are potentially massive because of the low costs of change.