International Collaboration and Improvement of Mechatronics Education based on Simulation and Virtual Instrument

 The mechatronics course, which is one of the important courses among st modern engineering experimentation area, must not only cover experimental techniques, sensors and transducers, signal processing and data analysis, but also include fundamental concepts of computer based data acquisition and simulation. The course materials and experimental apparatus for virtual instrument based experiments and practices have been developed in the School of Mechanical Engineering in Korea University of Technology and Education(KUT) and College of Engineering at the University of Hartford. Computer based data acquisition is taught as a series of incremental steps that leads the student from being a novice to be capable of designing, instrumentation and executing their own computer based data acquisitio n experiment. Virtual Instrument based on PC with DAQ board and LabVIEW software play a central role in this course. The academic partnership of KUT, University of Hartford and Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN” has resulted in several experiments that illustrate how virtual instruments have been used to teach Mechatronics System Design. Index Terms  virtual instrument, mechatronics system design, data acquisition, and sensor --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Seong Joo Choi, School of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education, sjchoi@kut.ac.kr 2 Devdas Shetty, College of Engineering, University of Hartford, shetty@mail.hartford.edu 3 Jury Poduraev, Department of Robotics and Mechatronics, Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN”, poduraev@stankin.ru 4 Woo Young Lee, School of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education, wylee@kut.ac.kr 5 Jae Hyup Lee, School of Information Technology, Korea University of Technology and Education jae@kut.ac.kr