It is a hard time for all of us, but the mechatronic systems can support us. Teams of engineers and scientists are working on different solutions, such as cleaning and disinfection robot for potentially contaminated surfaces in buildings such as door handles, light switches or elevator buttons.

One goal, extremely different solutions - this is usually the effect of students working in groups on design project. Presented by MAD Research Group marble balls sorting machines are the result of Mechatronics 424 - Group design project.

The metallic parts during the manufacturing process require surface preparation using grinding and polishing methods. It can be local or complete machining. Local most often concerns the surface preparation of welded joints and complete includes preparation of the entire surface of element.

The parts warehouse usually we associate with large halls full of high racks along which forklifts or robots drive. Depending on the complexity of the structure, the use of mechatronic systems, parts warehouse are more or less complicated. Dustin Dobransky built his own warehouse system in microscale compared to industry solutions.

All-terrain capabilities are required to extend beyond flat surfaces the application range of wheeled robots. First think is four or six-legged robots which have been well known for years. Nowadays, thanks to more and more perfect gait algorithms, the two-legged (bipedal) robots appears more and more often. ETH Zürich students combine the advantages of wheeled robot and two-legged robot.

The three wheels balancing robot is similar to a ballbot from the point of view of the goal. In comparison to ballbot which balance itself on a single ball, three wheels balancing robot is designed to balance itself on a single rod. The common characteristics of this kind of robots is that there’s one sole contact point to the ground.

Traditional rigid robotic grippers are widely used in industry, but gentle and adaptive manipulation is limited. Scientists [1, 2] found the bioinspired way to create multi-degree-of-freedom soft actuators with appropriate sensory capabilities. Authors produced soft mechatronic fingers using embedded 3D printing and use integrated ionogel soft sensors.

Learning how to build a robot is a long way. It is the way by mechanics, electronics and programming. Such a mechatronics project is associated with problems such as stiffness (mechanics), overvoltage (electronics) or bug (software). Of course, if something is wrong, we always say 'it's not a bug, it's a feature', but finally a robot has to start working properly.

In many areas robots are better than us. They are more precise, great at computations and can work without interruption in continuous mode. Their advantages are used in many industry areas, but mechatronic projects can be also a bit crazy, but very interesting scientifically and technically. An example of such an application is billard cue stick.

Lumipen is the projection mapping system developed by the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo . It can track moving objects and it keeps them in the center of the screen continuously. Also, this mechatronic camera system can project images onto a moving object.

Autonomous Self-Reconfigurable Locomotive Robot: designed and built by Muhammad Hasan Shariq for BEng Mechanical Engineering Honours Project (2009-2010) at Heriot-Watt University, Dubai Campus.

Do you sort M&Ms or Skittles by colour before eating them?  For example, eat all the yellow ones first, then the red ones, then the blue and so on. Brian Egenriether, an electrical engineer, decided to make a small machine that looked like an appliance, which could perform these tasks automatically. This mechatronics project took him about 5 weekends to make. The use of the machine is very simple: pour Skittles or M&Ms into it, push a button and have candies sorted. Let us look at the construction.