Towards a general tool for mechatronic design

This paper is a report on our initial attempt to develop a general tool and explore a non-traditional approach to mechatronic design, which emphasizes simultaneous mechanical and control design. The approach is centered around our novel GA-based design methodology that is specially developed for exploring possible design alternatives in early design stages with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary design. The suggested methodology, as applied to mechatronics, transforms the common GA-based search in the space of individual solutions into a search that relies heavily on exploration of the space of mechatronic sub-concepts. In addition to demonstrating the validity of our proposed technique to mechatronics, we show the relevance of our methodology to control design at large.