Several industrial sectors experience an increased reliance on mechatronic systems as electronics and software are being embedded into the traditional mechanical systems of these industries. Important challenges within mechatronics engineering comes from management of multi-disciplinary development project teams and the highly complex scope of problems, which in turn require extensive coordination and integration, both in terms of technical and organisational matters. The concept of cross-functional integration in product development research has in previous research mainly addressed integration of the functions marketing, R&D, and manufacturing, and whereas the present thesis is delimited to include only the R&D organization and the functions and engineering disciplines within such an organization. The purpose with thesis has been to investigate mechatronics engineering in order to understand and explain how co-operation, integration, and knowledge sharing between engineering disciplines can be supported. This research has been realized by empirical studies in mechatronic development settings in engineering companies, but also by taking part in industrial and academic research projects that develop and study computer-aided mechatronics engineering. Findings presented in this thesis show that mechatronics is a matter of integration at three organizational levels where the most substantial needs are found to be at the team-level and the individual level. Furthermore, it is identified that to be able to succeed in mechatronics engineering, managers and engineers must look beyond disciplinary needs. Subsequently, both teamwork and competence management become key issues for management of mechatronics engineering. Finally, computer-supported and model-based development of mechatronics show great potential for successful integration of engineering disciplines, even though such technological aids are still rather immature and needs further research and development. A tentative analysis model of organizational integration for mechatronics engineering is also presented and discussed in this thesis. Based on the presented findings, it is concluded that companies incorporating electronics and software in their mechanical products must effectively manage software and electronics development of these embedded systems. Despite the focus on cross-functional integration in engineering companies, this thesis shows examples of inadequate integration of software and electronics engineering with mechanical integration in organisations dominated by the latter. Future research studies are needed to investigate the relation between factors influencing the need for organizational integration and potential integration mechanisms. To further understand mechatronics engineering it is important to look deeper into research issues such as changed conditions for the engineering profession implied by multidisciplinary settings, social systems supporting integration of disciplines, changed work conditions due to implementation of technological aids for model-based system development, relationship between product and organizational complexity, organizational designs supporting integration of engineering disciplines, and cross-disciplinary training of highly specialized engineers. / QC 20101123

The task of modeling and controlling the evolution of dynamical sys- tems is one of the main objectives in mechatronics engineering. When approaching the problem of controlling physical or digital systems, the dynamical models have been historically divided into continuous-time, described by differential equations, and discrete-time, described by difference equations. In the last decade, a new class of models, known as hybrid dynamical systems, has gained popularity in the control community because of its high versatility. This framework combines continuous-time and discrete- time evolution, thus allowing for both the description of a broader class of systems and the achievement of better-performing controllers, compared to the traditional continuous-time alternatives. After the first rigorous introduction of the framework, several Lyapunov-based results were published in the literature, and numerous application areas were shown to benefit from the introduction of a hybrid dynamics, like systems involving impacts or physical systems connected to digital controllers (cyber-physical systems). In this thesis, we use the hybrid framework to study different mechatronics-inspired control problems. The applications we consider are diverse, so we split the presentation into three parts. In the first part we further analyze a particular hybrid control strategy, known as reset control, providing some new theoretical guarantees, together with an application to adaptive control. In the second part we consider two applications of the hybrid framework to the network dynamics field, specifically we analyze the problems of distributed state estimation and of uniform synchronization of nonlinear oscillators. In the third part, we use a hybrid approach to study two applications where this framework has been rarely employed, or not at all, namely smart agriculture and trajectory tracking for a bipedal walking robot. We study these application-inspired problems from a theoretical point of view, giving robust Lyapunov-based stability guarantees. We complement the theoretical analysis with numerical results, obtained from simulations or from experiments.