A few days ago a friend emailed me the link to a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww) from a company called Boston Dynamics. The video was of BigDog, a radio-controlled, quadruped robot carrying a 300-plus pound payload over uneven terrain, snow and ice, moving and staying upright even when kicked by a human. I don’t often get excited about videos (heaven knows there are enough of them around on every subject imaginable), but BigDog’s is absolutely fascinating. It brought to mind an area of engineering that many of us in the semiconductor field don’t hear or think enough about – robotics – or, even more specifically, mechatronics.
By combining aspects of microelectronics, mechanical engineering and control systems, mechatronics successfully encompasses multiple engineering disciplines to develop products that come into our lives in many diverse areas. Some of the more interesting examples are the Segway personal transportation system, Roomba automated vacuum cleaner and bomb-sniffing robots used by police.
Too often, we electronics types are too involved with “our� engineering world, that of the transistor and its non-silicon support subsystems, such as batteries (for power) and antennas (for wireless data transmitting and receiving). Besides the occasional motor control, sensor conditioning and camera manipulation, for the most part chip designers are involved with what happens on the silicon and meeting the specs required to work in a particular (electronics) system. Systems knowledge is usually confined to the electronics system.
BigDog is a great example of a well-engineered, multi-discipline system. The future growth of the semiconductor industry will come as chip engineering continues to merge with mechanics, fluidics, biology and other scientific field of study. We should all watch the BigDog video and start thinking outside of the silicon box.