Background
The American Society for Precision Engineering (ASPE) is constituting a number of Technical Leadership Committees (TLC’s) in an effort to increase the involvement of the Board of Directors (BoD) in the technical direction of the Society. In the future, these TLCs will be chaired by individual Board members with responsibility for particular technology areas. At the present time, the committees will be headed by one serving member of the Board and one appointee in order to facilitate an orderly transition. Six technical areas have been identified with Mechatronics and Control being one of them.
Mission Statement
The Controls and Mechatronics TLC aims to develop and promote a broader understanding of the precision engineering principles of determinism for use in the architecture design and control of high‐performance mechatronic systems.
Subject Area
The primary subject area of the Controls and Mechatronics TLC includes (but is not limited to)
- Precision positioning systems
- Multi‐degree‐of‐freedom control
- Advances in sensors, actuators, and drives
- Modeling techniques and model‐based mechatronic design
- System identification and data‐based design
- Control of friction induced systems
- Feedforward control
- Iterative learning control
- Disturbance estimation and control
- Autotuning and self‐tuning techniques
- Active and passive strategies for vibration control
- Thermal management and control
- Dynamic error budgeting
Responsibilities and Deliverables
The responsibilities and deliverables of the TLC are
- Gather and disseminate the State‐of‐the‐Art (SOTA) in Precision Mechatronics and Controls.
- Advise the Annual Meeting Chair on the SOTA, relevance of topics, proposals for Keynote speakers and invited/special papers.
- Recommend topical meeting(s) and assist the topical meeting Chair.
- Solicit qualified conference papers and speakers in consultation with the Annual Meeting Chair to deliver an appropriate description of the SOTA.
- Prepare a review paper for publication in Precision Engineering. This is typically once each three year term unless developments suggest a more‐frequent review.
- Deliver an oral presentation at the ASPE Annual Meeting reporting the learning of the Committee in support of the review paper.
Committee Interactions
The Committee will meet periodically (at least every 3 months) to provide updates, discuss progress and coordinate efforts. Periodic meetings will be held using web‐based teleconferencing tools. Face‐to‐face meetings will be held when a sufficiently large portion of the group is physically present at a single geographic location, e.g., ASPE Annual or Topical Meeting. Members who are unable to attend may attend via web‐based teleconference.
Committee Governance & Structure
The committee will be headed by the responsible member of the Board and a vice‐chair elected from among the Committee’s membership. The expectation is that the vice‐chair will succeed the current chair to ensure continuity. The committee will have members with expertise in different areas of mechatronics and control. Part of the committee formation process will be to identify these areas and recruit people with the appropriate expertise. Overlapping areas of expertise are to be expected and are welcomed. Subcommittees in each technical area are also a possibility.
Interaction with the Society
The Controls and Mechatronics TLC will interact with the Executive Committee of the ASPE on a regular basis through the committee chair(s). Frequency of this interaction is TBD.
Membership
The Controls and Mechatronics TLC is expected to consist of members with a broad range of interests and expertise in various aspects of mechatronic system design and control. It should also maintain broad representation from industry, government, and academia. Committee members will be encouraged to actively solicit and recruit new members, and if sufficient interest exists, to create new sub‐committees and special interest groups where appropriate.