Towards a modular, service-oriented mechatronic system

The demand for flexible and scalable mechatronic system is becoming more and more attractive. Modular systems made from a large number of modules can be formed various physical or logical topologies, consequently to achieve the capabilities to optimize their configurations to suit different applications. Although, modular concept will bring new scalable and extendable products for customers, it puts new requirements for the product development. Shift from tightly-coupled systems to service-oriented architecture will bring deep impact to the research and development of the modular embedded devices, applications and services, i.e. function elements can be easily added or removed without modifying the whole hardware and software of the systems. In this paper, we first discuss the opportunities, challenges and requirements for the modular mechatronic systems development, and then, present directions for loose-coupled modular devices based on service-oriented control architecture, in particular, this paper outlines the implementation of this architecture adopted by the Miniaturized Modular Devices project.