Precision Mechatronics

Precision mechatronics is the discipline of designing, sensing, and controlling systems where small errors carry large consequences, from a micro-fabricated pressure sensor to a robotic manipulator tracking a path. This volume follows that thread across scales. It opens inside microelectromechanical systems, moves through the robust control laws that govern them, continues to the joint-space control of serial manipulators, and closes with the compliant, bio-inspired mechanisms of soft robotics. The unifying idea is that accurate modelling and disciplined control, not more hardware, are what deliver precision. The chapters are analytical and design-oriented. The MEMS sensing chapter uses multiphysics, nonlinear modelling to show how tuning a single material parameter reshapes a capacitive pressure sensor's behaviour, cutting its operating voltage several-fold. The control chapters develop a predefined-time sliding mode framework with formal Lyapunov guarantees for a triaxial MEMS gyroscope, and a from-first-principles treatment of PID joint-space control for planar manipulators, complete with a worked multi-degree-of-freedom case study and a comparison against more advanced strategies. The closing chapter widens the lens to soft robotics and bio-inspired design, where compliance itself becomes a control resource. Read together, the chapters connect the micro and the macro sides of mechatronics under a single concern for precision, offering readers both rigorous methods and a sense of how sensing, control, and mechanism design reinforce one another.