The term, Mechatronics, was coined in the early 1970s by Tetsuo Mori, of Yaskawa Electric Corp. It was a Japanese-English neologism for Mechanical Electronics, and was intended to describe an interdisciplinary process of engineering that focuses on the integration of mechanical and electronic and electrical systems.
The University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, course catalog sums it up: “Mechatronics engineering is the design of computer-controlled electromechanical systems. The essence of it is that the design of the mechanical system must be performed together with the design of the electrical/electronic and computer control aspects that together, comprise a complete system.” Waterloo’s course catalog continues, mechatronic products are “essentially mechanical in nature but could not function without the integral design of the electrical and computer control systems that are critical to their operation.”