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MA5-Design Principles for Precision Mechatronics – Part 1

Dr. Johannes P. Vermeulen (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Dr. Dannis M. Brouwer (University of Twente)

Monday, October 26, 2026 (1:30 PM – 5:30 PM)

TA5-Design Principles for Precision Mechatronics – Part 2

Dr. Johannes P. Vermeulen (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Tuesday, October 27, 2026 (1:30 PM – 5:30 PM)

Despite the revolutionary advances in Precision Engineering and Mechatronics in the last few decades, the importance of design for repeatability, has remained equally important as stressed earlier by Clayton Teague, Chris Evans, Pat McKeown, and Wim van der Hoek, for example, through kinematic design to guarantee the integrity of high accuracy parts, such as wafer chucks, metrology frames, sensors and projection optics. To further increase control bandwidth, it became beneficial in the 2010 timeframe to introduce the concept of over-actuation to avoid excitation of internal mode shapes at high acceleration setpoint. Although seemingly contradictory to kinematic design, over-actuation does not necessarily affect repeatability, provided that ‘force’ actuators are used with very limited residual non-linearities in position and current. Also, the importance of thorough understanding of the relevant dynamics in the design has not changed since the analyses of cam shaft mechanisms in the 1950s, but focus has shifted from creating favorable time responses to shaping of frequency response functions (FRFs). Driven by developments in optical storage, such as CD and DVD players, and later on semiconductor equipment in the 1990s, the understanding of superposition of mode shapes and optimal actuator and sensor placement to ‘shape’ the dynamic FRFs was key to robust controller design in combination with good performance. In the 2010s, the implementation of passive damping was added to realize suppression of amplifications at resonances and thereby, sufficient exponential decay of undesired vibrations in uncontrolled DoFs. Damping, which was abandoned for a long time in view of the risk of position uncertainty by hysteresis, became a new design paradigm.

As a result of increasing complexity at the component level, driven, among others, by Moore’s Law, more ‘global’ mechatronic solutions are required these days to enable better performance at reduced cost. Precision Mechatronics design these days implies ‘the balancing of complexity at the component level to control motion down to the atomic level’.

This Tutorial on Design Principles for Precision Mechatronics will focus on ‘how to design hardware as part of a modern, precision mechatronic system’. Via numerous examples and case studies, along with the underlying physics, Precision Engineering design principles for deterministic machine behavior will be explained in many detail (see below and https://www.dspe.nl/knowledge/dppm-cases/). Part 1 covers the principles: 1) Kinematic design, 2) Design for stiffness, 3) Lightweight design, 4) Design for symmetry, and 5) Design for low friction and hysteresis. Part 2 touches upon the principles, 6) Design for damping, 7) Design for low sensitivity (short timescale), 8) Design for stability (long timescale), 9) Design for load compensation, and 10) Design for minimal cost and complexity.