1. "Why mechatronics?

The first truly significant mechatronic product is certainly the industrial robot. It incorporates all the components of mechatronics – mechanics, electronics and computerized control – and, above all, can only exist thanks to the close integration of these three components. The first of these was installed in a General Motors factory in 1961. It had been designed a few years earlier by the American manufacturer Unimation.

The second major development was in aeronautics, which would later become one of the main "consumers" of mechatronics, along with the automotive industry. In this case, we're talking about fly-by-wire flight controls. They were inaugurated in 1972 with the flight of the American F8-Digital Fly-By-Wire fighter, an aircraft whose design had begun a good ten years earlier, in the early 1960s. The torch was soon taken up by the Concorde (first commercial...