Mechatronics Academy

The essence of success in Mechatronics

Excellence in any mechatronic development project can only be achieved by a team consisting of the best experts with:

  - in-depth knowledge of own domain

  - basic understanding of adjacent domains

  - cooperation attitude & skills


Do you want to enhance your mechatronics skills & enjoy more success in projects ?

The Mechatronics Academy, located in the Brainport region Eindhoven, provides training on each of the three essential dimensions. It is run by leading experts, who combine insights from academics with many years of industrial experience, and its short courses can be booked via High Tech Institute.

The pool of trainers consists of a mix of experts from industry and university, who understand that it's not about what you tell during a training but what the participants can apply after the training. Consequently, next to the theoretical basics, interaction and practical exercises are essential parts of all courses in our applied mechatronics training curriculum.

Training Portfolio Mechatronics Academy

Courses (in alphabetic order)

Highlights

December 21, 2023
The new 3-days course 'Bearing Principles for Precision Motion' focuses on the design, modelling and implementation of bearing elements in precision motion systems. The trainers will discuss the trade-offs between performance on the one hand, and cost and complexity on the other hand for different application areas, such as medical equipment, machine tools, scientific instrumentation and semiconductor applications. Read more ....

Bearing Principles for Precision Motion

November 16, 2022
Our partner Prof.Dr. Hans Vermeulen wins prestigious Rien Koster award. The price is 'for his tireless effort to propagate and innovate the field of mechatronics and precision technology', said the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering (DSPE). More news ....

Hans Vermeulen receives Rien Koster award 2022
Rien Koster, Hans Vermeulen, Ton Peijnenburg and Hans Krikhaar

November 4, 2021
Our co-founder Prof.Dr. Jan van Eijk is awarded the ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award 2021 for broad-reaching advances in precision mechatronics and for promoting the active sharing of these advances throughout the technical community. More news ....

Jan van Eijk speaks at the DSPE Conference on Precision Mechatronics
Jan van Eijk speaks at the DSPE Conference on Precision Mechatronics

Pool of expert trainers

Partners

Image Jan van Eijk

Prof.dr.ir. Jan van Eijk

Co-Founder & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
Owner MICE b.v.
Past
Professor Advanced Mechatronics Delft University of Technology
VP & CTO Philips Applied Technologies
Other
Holder EUSPEN Lifetime Achievement Award 2012
Holder DSPE Martin van den Brink Award 2016
Holder ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award 2021
Image Dick Laro

Dr.ir. Dick Laro

Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
System Architect at MI-Partners
Past
Mechatronical Developer at Singulus Mastering
Other
Co-chairman ASPE 2020 Spring Topical Meeting
Various tutorials at EUSPEN and ASPE conferences
Image Tom Oomen

Prof.dr.ir. Tom Oomen

Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
Full Professor Eindhoven University of Technology
Full Professor Delft University of Technology
Past
Visiting positions at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden and at The University of Newcastle, Australia.
Other
Associate Editor IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
Associate Editor IEEE Control Systems Letters
Associate Editor IFAC Mechatronics
Recipient of the 7th Grand Nagamori Award
Image Adrian Rankers

Dr.ir. Adrian Rankers

Co-Founder, Managing Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
Past
Philips Applied Technologies, Manager Mechatronics Technologies
Philips Assembleon, Manager System Group, Sustaining & Program
Philips CFT Groupleader & Technologist Machine Dynamics & Control
Other
Board Member DSPE (Dutch Society for Precision Engineering)
Chairman DSPE Conference on Precision Mechatronics
Image Theo Ruijl

Dr.ir. Theo Ruijl

Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
MI-Partners, CTO at MI-Partners Past
FEI Company, Sr. Mechatronics System Architect
Philips Applied Technologies/CFT, Technologist and Competence Leader Thermal effects in Mechatronics Systems
Other
Euspen Council Member
ASPE member of College of Fellows
Image Maarten Steinbuch

Prof.dr.ir. Maarten Steinbuch

Co-Founder, Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
Distinguished University Professor Eindhoven University of Technology
Past
Groupleader Philips CFT
Researcher Philips Research
Other
Scientific Director Eindhoven Engine
Image Hans Vermeulen

Prof.dr.ir. Hans Vermeulen

Partner & Trainer Mechatronics Academy
Professor Mechatronic Systems Design, Eindhoven University of Technology
Senior Principal Architect EUV Optics, ASML Development & Engineering
Past
Senior Research Manager and Group Leader, ASML Research
System Architect and Project Leader, Philips CFT / Philips Electronics North America Corporation / Philips Applied Technologies
Other
Chairman National R&D Work Group Mechatronics
ASML Patent Award 2010
DSPE Rien Koster Award 2022

News

December 21, 2023
The new 3-days course 'Bearing Principles for Precision Motion' focuses on the design, modelling and implementation of bearing elements in precision motion systems. The trainers will discuss the trade-offs between performance on the one hand, and cost and complexity on the other hand for different application areas, such as medical equipment, machine tools, scientific instrumentation and semiconductor applications.

Bearing Principles for Precision Motion

In precision motion systems, the focus is often on the actuated degrees of freedom (DoF) since these involve actuation, position sensing and motion control. In most/many cases, however, the non-actuated, constrained DoFs are equally important since these are exposed to similar disturbance forces as the actuated DoFs and accuracy requirements are comparably challenging. Known solutions for constraining degrees of freedom in precision motion systems are roller bearings, flexure bearings, gas bearings and active/passive magnetic bearings, but what technology fits your application best? In order to answer that question one needs to understand the essence, pros/cons and limitations of each of these bearing technologies.
In optical disk drives that were developed in the 1980s, originally, a swing arm supported by roller bearings was used to move the optical pick-up unit from the inner to the outer radius of the disk and to accurately follow a particular track. In later generations, driven by a smaller pitch and tighter accuracy requirements, the swing arm was replaced by a translational guide way based on sliding contacts for coarse positioning, combined with a flexure bearings for fine positioning of the pick-up unit in radial and focus direction.
Typically, when designing precision motion systems, various design parameters have to be balanced and simultaneously optimized, such as range of motion, accuracy and reproducibility, stiffness and damping. Although sliding and also rolling contacts suffer from stick-slip behaviour and (virtual) play, cost and complexity are low and performance might be good enough for coarse positioning. When low friction and hysteresis is required, or strict requirements on particle generation hold, it may be advantageous to fully separate surfaces via full film bearings, either aerostatic or hydrostatic. For large range of motion in vacuum conditions, such as in electron microscopes, E-beam inspection or EUV lithography systems, active magnetic bearing systems (AMBs) are highly advantageous. Despite higher cost, these systems have the additional advantage that frame vibrations can be isolated from the motion stage. When only small translations or rotations are required, flexure bearings can provide excellent reproducibility, particularly if manufactured monolithically. These bearings, however, suffer from parasitic stiffness and have very little damping.
This course will focus on the design, modelling and implementation of bearing elements in precision motion systems. We will discuss the trade-offs between performance on the one hand, and cost and complexity on the other hand. Both passive and active bearing technologies will be extensively discussed. We will focus on different application areas, such as medical equipment, machine tools, scientific instrumentation and semiconductor applications.

November 16, 2022
Our partner Prof.Dr. Hans Vermeulen wins prestigious Rien Koster award.

Hans Vermeulen receives Rien Koster award 2022
Rien Koster, Hans Vermeulen, Ton Peijnenburg and Hans Krikhaar

Enthusiastic, hardworking, inspiring, and a team player, these words of praise were given to Hans Vermeulen by Rien Koster when he presented the award which bears his name. Vermeulen is senior principal architect EUV-optics at ASML, part-time professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), and trainer at High Tech Institute. The award is 'for his tireless effort to propagate and innovate the field of mechatronics and precision technology', said the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering (DSPE). Vermeulen has an impressive track record within precision mechanics and mechatronics and educating a new generation of precision technologists. After his promotion on precision machining he started at Philips CFT, where he worked with semiconductor equipment, including in the US. In 2007, when ASML took over mechatronics research, he switched to the litho manufacturer. He played various roles within Development & Engineering (D&E) and Research. He was appointed as part-time professor Mechatronic System Design in 2015 at the department of Mechanical Engineering at TUE. In his field of expertise, Vermeulen pays a lot of attention to the basics, the history, and he also has an eye for new developments. For a long time he was the chair of the Nationale Werkgroep Mechatronica, founded at Philips for distribution and publication of the field. Two years ago, together with Just Herder from Delft University of Technology and Dannis Brouwer from the University of Twente, he took the initiative to put together a new standard work on design principles. It is an update of the Des Duivels Prentenboek by Wim van der Hoek which has been updated by several leaders in the industry in recent years, under which Koster. The book will appear in 2025 with the title Design Principles for Precision Mechatronics. In the meantime, there is a website live. The jury called Vermeulen ‘an inspiration, also beyond his technical expertise’. His personal contribution was also emphasized. Vermeulen is able to give his team a lot of room to move forward.

November 4, 2021
Our co-founder Prof.Dr. Jan van Eijk is awarded the ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award for broad-reaching advances in precision mechatronics and for promoting the active sharing of these advances throughout the technical community. Jan van Eijk accepts the ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award as a representative of the Dutch community in precision engineering.

Jan van Eijk speaks at the 2014 DSPE Conference on Precision Mechatronics
Jan van Eijk speaks at the 2014 edition of te DSPE Conference on Precision Mechatronics.

As a pillar of this community, he has contributed by initiating and heading innovative applied research activities and by active sharing of industrial expertise. This collaborative spirit was first realized in 1989 with the creation of an in-house mechatronics training program for Philips engineers where industrial trainers taught new engineers how to work in multi-disciplinary teams and to employ each other’s technical strengths in order to reach the best overall result. This course has by now educated some 2500 engineers and established a solid foundation as other training programs were created to cover the additional disciplines. Beginning in 2010, these training activities were continued outside of the Philips organization by the establishment of the “Mechatronics Academy”.

He started his education at the Delft University of Technology with a MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering. Following this, he spent three years abroad working at universities in Pakistan and Sri Lanka as a UNESCO associate before returning to Delft to complete a doctoral program that included a dissertation on the design of flexure mechanisms. He received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1985.

Prof.Dr. van Eijk then worked for twenty-two years at the Philips company in their Centre For Industrial Technology (CFT). The Philips company, based in the Netherlands, has been a birthplace of advances in science and technology since the early years of the twentieth century. This Centre formed the knowledge base for mass production technology in Philips. Research done in the “Natlab” was famous and the development of high-throughput manufacturing machines proved to be an important factor in the decades-long growth of the organization. Throughout his career, Jan van Eijk has had the opportunity to build on this foundation and to work with many excellent engineers in the field of high precision mechatronics.

His unique skills and expertise have arisen from the knowledge and experience gained from working at Philips where he became Chief Technical Officer of Mechatronics. While building a mechatronic technology center of about 200 engineers, he made conceptual contributions to a wide range of applications, including optical disc drive systems and lithography systems. With the start of ASML in 1985, Dr. van Eijk contributed to key concepts and to the architecture of mechatronic elements of ASML’s highly successful lithography tools. The use of a rigorous metrology concept, introduced in 1986, formed a significant contribution to the early lithography machines.

After leaving Philips in 2007 he founded his own company, Mechatronic Innovation and Concept Engineering (MICE), to continue to provide consultancy to world-class equipment manufacturers world-wide. He advises not only on technical concepts and designs for systems, but also on how to develop key components necessary for the successful growth of advanced technology organisations.

His skill in explaining sophisticated concepts in a very accessible way was further heightened by teaching for twelve years as a part-time professor at the Delft University of Technology from 2000 through 2012. There he supervised doctoral students on projects related to using active magnetic bearings for precision applications. As a co-author he contributed to the book 'The Design of High Performance Mechatronics' written by Prof. Rob Munnig Schmidt. This book gives an industrial perspective on the multi-disciplinary knowledge used in mechatronic engineering.

Jan van Eijk served on the council of euspen and the board of directors of ASPE for several years. In 2012 he was awarded the euspen Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2016 the DSPE awarded him the Martin van den Brink award for his leading role in the architecting of high-technology systems.

February 17, 2020
The third revised edition of the book 'The Design of High Performance Mechatronics' is released.
3rd revised edition of the book 'The Design of High Performance Mechatronics'

October 20, 2018
New 3 days hands-on training Passive Damping for High Tech Systems addresses the need and solutions for additional damping in high precision systems. In the design of high precision mechatronic systems it is essential to achieve a high bandwidth of the feedback control loop in order to suppress the negative effects of disturbing forces on the machine accuracy and settling time. Dynamics and resonances play an important role in limiting the achievable bandwidth and settling time. Much focus is therefore rightfully directed towards high eigenfrequencies and understanding vibration modes including the mechanims of excitation and observability. However, as accuracy and resulting bandwidth requirements are getting tighter, the requirements in terms of eigenfrequencies of the system are sometimes reaching the limits of what is physically possible. In these situations, passive damping offers additional design space and is becoming a key design parameter for achieving these extreme requirements. Despite the risk of introducing hysteresis related virtual play, passive damping can significantly simplify controller design and improve positioning performance. In recent years much effort has been devoted to better understand the underlying principles of damping, improve modelling, prediction and manufacturing. This has resulted in spectacular results which otherwise would not have been possible. In the new short course 'Passive Damping for High Tech Systems' the experts from industry and academia share the latest insights and design approaches.

December 10, 2017
Full day tutorial DYNAMICS & CONTROL OF MECHATRONIC SYSTEMS by Dr. Adrian Rankers and Dr. Dick Laro (MI-Partners) during the 2018 euspen conference in Venice.

April 19, 2017
Full day tutorial Dynamics & Control of Mechatronic Systems by Dr. Adrian Rankers and Dr. Dick Laro & Tim Groothuijsen (MI-Partners) during the 2017 annual meeting of euspen in Hannover.

May 26, 2016
Jan van Eijk , former CTO Mechatronics at Philips Applied Technologies and professor emeritus Advanced Mechatronics at TU Delft , wins the Martin van den Brink Award. Van Eijk is considered the founder of mechatronics in the Netherlands and an idiosyncratic thinker, who puts a lot of emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and soft skills. He has contributed to many innovations from Philips and spin-offs such as ASML. During his industrial/academic career he has set up many training activities.

Jan van Eijk wins Martin van den Brink Award (4,4Mb)
Award Ceremony (Martin van den Brink (left), Jan van Eijk, Hans Krikhaar, Jos Benschop)

April 20, 2016
Tutorial 'The Dutch Approach to High Performance Motion Control' by Maarten Steinbuch and Adrian Rankers during ASPE Spring Topical Meeting 2016, which is held at MIT/Cambridge.

MIT building (4,4Mb)
MIT building

Feb 14, 2016
In January 2016, Jan van Eijk, Rob Munnig Schmidt and Adrian Rankers travelled to ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) in Taiwan to deliver the Mechatronic System Design training. ITRI (more than 5,000 employees) was founded in 1973 and opened a Netherlands office in 2013, at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, to expand its network to Dutch high-tech companies.

ITRI group picture (1,8Mb)
Participants and trainers in front of the building of ITRI College.

The initiative to bring the well-known training from the Eindhoven region to Taiwan was taken by Prof. Shuo Huong Chang, former executive vice president of ITRI, professor at National Taiwan University and co-founder of TSPE (Taiwan Society for Precision Engineering). After a meeting with DSPE president Hans Krikhaar and Adrian Rankers in 2013, Prof. Chang was convinced of the concept that large multi-disciplinary teams can only be successful on system level if team members combine three elements:

- excellence in their own discipline
- basic understanding of adjacent disciplines
- cooperation attitude and skills

End of 2015, euspen and DSPE launched the new combined certification program for precision engineering post-graduate education, called ECP2, as the European successor to DSPE's Certified Precision Engineer program. The participants of the Mechatronic System Design course were the first to receive the new combined euspen/DSPE certificate.
ITRI euspen ecp2 certificate (1,8Mb)
Participant Hsiang-Hung Chang receiving the euspen/DSPE ECP2 certificate from Prof. Rob Munnig Schmidt.

June 20, 2014
Another successful edition of the Summerschool Opto-Mechatronics, has come to an end. Fortunately, we still got the picture. Summerschool Optomechatronics 2014 (887K)

April 10, 2014
Half-day tutorial Advanced Mechatronic System Design by Rob Munnig Schmidt (Delft University of Technology) and Adrian Rankers (Mechatronics Academy) during the 14th International EUSPEN Conference in Dubrovnic 2 June, 2014.

February 3, 2014
The second revised edition of the book The Design of High Performance Mechatronics by Robert Munnig Schmidt, Georg Schitter, Adrian Rankers and Jan van Eijk (ISBN 978-1-61499-367-4) is now available at IOS Press.

November, 2013
MECHATRONICS ACADEMY in MIKRONIEK (journal of the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering)

September 26, 2013
The 1000th CPE certificate within the DSPE Certified Precision Engineer training framework has been awarded to Saudith Estela Durango Galvan from ASML after completion of our training Actuation & Power Electronics.
1000th DSPE certificate
From left to the right: Trainer Sven Hol, DSPE chairman Hans Krikhaar, Saudith Estela Durango Galvan of ASML, trainer Rob Munnig Schmidt.

May 20, 2013
Half-day tutorial 'Advanced Mechatronic System Design' by Rob Munnig Schmidt (TUDelft) and Adrian Rankers (Mechatronics Academy) during the 13th International EUSPEN Conference in Berlin 27 May, 2013.

Oct 22, 2012
1-day tutorial 'Vibration Isolation - active and passive systems'' given by Prof. Jan van Eijk and Dr. Adrian Rankers during annual ASPE meeting in San Diego.

June 5, 2012
During the annual meeting in Stockholm - the EUSPEN organisation honours Prof.Dr. Jan van Eijk with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his exceptional contribution to the field of precision mechatronics.

Links

  High Tech Institute
  Dutch Society for Precision Engineering
  European Society for Precision Engineering
  American Society for Precision Engineering
  euspen certified precision engineering course program