This is an incredibly insightful and practical course by Prof. Kevin Craig, who taught me Mechatronics more than 20 years ago. Kevin has modernized the content and instruction to make this course fully online and serve the ever-growing need for mechatronic skills in several industries including automotive, space, medical devices, manufacturing, semiconductor, robotics, warehouse automation, consumer electronics, and many more. Today’s products and technologies increasingly leverage sensing, actuation, and computation to achieve a high degree of automation along with greater performance and efficiency. Mechatronics is a foundational skill needed to design and develop such systems in a systematic and logical manner, as opposed to an ad hoc approach that often leads to time delays and cost overruns. Rather than simply introducing practicing engineers to the relevant skills, this course teaches how to systematically approach any complex robotic / mechatronic system. Engineering managers looking to empower and provide ongoing learning for their engineering teams will find this course to be invaluable. The cutting-edge mechatronics knowledge and skills learned will help engineers meet various hardware design and product development needs in their projects.
The impact of our interaction with Kevin Craig is that he helped change the culture of engineering design at P&G. As a result of this decade long collaboration, all P&G engineers working on dynamic machine based systems are exposed to the in-house training courses that are based on Kevin Craig's industry-tested techniques. We have shown over and over, millions of dollars of savings due to the direct application of his model-based mechatronic approach to engineering design.
Not only did Kevin create and implement one best engineering design curriculum of its kind at RPI, he has repeated the same success now at Marquette University. Moreover, his teaching material and philosophy are being implemented at several universities via his colleagues and former students. Some that readily come to mind include Columbia University, University of Michigan, Yildiz Technical University (Turkey), and West Point. This clearly demonstrates how Kevin's influence and impact has not simply been restricted to his own organization but has been disseminated far and wide to benefit countless engineering students.
