awesome-mechatronics
A list of awesome mechatronics books, courses and software.
https://github.com/engyasin/awesome-mechatronics
Last synced: 13 days ago
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0. What Mechatronics Means Now
Read the definition debate yourself 📄
- The Evolution of Mechatronics Engineering and Its Relationship with Industry 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0
- Mechatronics in Industry 4.0 and 5.0: advancing synergy, innovations, sustainability, and challenges
- Skills for Physical Artificial Intelligence
- Intelligence as Computation
- ITU-T F.748.66 - level attempt to standardise what "embodied AI system" means.
- Evolution from mechatronics to cyber-physical systems: an educational point of view
- Skills for Physical Artificial Intelligence
10. Hardware You Can Actually Buy or Build
8.4 Safety, assurance and governance
- SO-101 / SO-ARM101 - DoF arm pair | 🆓 open hardware. Leader/follower teleoperation; the LeRobot reference platform. Kits from Hiwonder, Seeed, WowRobo. ⭐ |
- LeKiwi - 101 on a holonomic base; open source |
- Koch v1.1 - DoF arm | The predecessor design; still a good build |
- ALOHA / ALOHA 2
- Open Duck Mini - robot learning platform |
- Reachy 2 / Reachy Mini
- Unitree Go2 / G1
- Franka Research 3 - DoF arm | The academic manipulation standard; excellent torque control |
- UR cobots
- TurtleBot 4
- Duckietown
- Open Dynamic Robot Initiative
11. Classic Mechatronic Systems
8.4 Safety, assurance and governance
- **ABS** - slip estimation from noisy sensors under hard real-time constraints. The canonical automotive mechatronic system.
- **3D printers** - systems case study. 🧪
- **GNSS/INS**
- **PLCs** - cycle computation; a genuinely different computational model worth understanding.
- **Hybrid & electric drivetrains** - split control, energy management, thermal.
- **Washing machines** - driven sensor minimisation. Deceptively deep.
- **Hard disk drives** - precision mass-produced servo system ever built; nanometre positioning at kHz bandwidth.
- **Surgical robots**
- **Wafer steppers** - nanometre stages, feed-forward everything, the field's hardest control problems.
13. Journals, Conferences, Communities
8.4 Safety, assurance and governance
- Mechatronics (Elsevier)
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
- International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
- Science Robotics
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics / Informatics
- Mechanism and Machine Theory
- Frontiers in Robotics and AI
- ICRA - ras.org/conferences-workshops/fully-sponsored/iros) — the two big robotics conferences
- RSS - to-noise; where Diffusion Policy and ACT appeared
- CoRL
- AIM
- Hannover Messe - munich.com/) — where industrial reality shows up
- NVIDIA GTC
- Hugging Face Robotics
14. Related Awesome Lists
8.4 Safety, assurance and governance
- Awesome Embedded and IoT Security
- Awesome C++ - python)
- Awesome Computer Vision
- Awesome Machine Learning - deep-learning)
- Awesome ROS2
- Awesome Robotics - robotics-libraries)
- Awesome VLA
- Awesome Physical AI
- Awesome LLM Robotics
- Awesome Embodied AI
- robotics-coursework
- Awesome Embedded - embedded/awesome-embedded-rust)
- Awesome Electronics
- Awesome Mechanical Engineering
- Awesome TinyML
- Awesome MCP Servers
1. Start Here: Learning Paths
Path A — Beginner, hands-on first (0–6 months) ⭐
- Paul McWhorter — Arduino for Beginners
- ControlSystemsAcademy / Brian Douglas — Control System Lectures
- MATLAB Tech Talks — Understanding PID Control
Path B — Undergraduate / career-switcher (6–18 months)
- OpenPLC - 1200, plus one OPC UA client.
-
Robot Learning: A Tutorial
- ramp from classical control to learned policies, with runnable
lerobotexamples.
Path C — Graduate / research 🔬
- Underactuated Robotics - rich control is hard.
- Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation: A Comprehensive Survey
- Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applications
- LIBERO - env/SimplerEnv), RoboCasa) and reproduce one result before you propose anything.
2. Foundations: Books & Courses
Control & dynamics (free where possible) 📖
- Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers
- Data-Driven Science and Engineering
- Applied Nonlinear Control
- Predictive Control for Linear and Hybrid Systems
- Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms
Core mechatronics textbooks 📖
- Mechatronics: Electronic Control Systems in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering
- Machine Vision and Mechatronics in Practice
- Introduction to Mechatronics and Measurement Systems
- Automotive Mechatronics
- Mechatronic Systems: Modelling and Simulation with HDLs - based modelling of mixed-domain systems.
- The Mechatronics Handbook - edition PDF. Reference work, not a textbook.
- Control of Mechatronic Systems
Courses worth your time 🎓
- Learn 5 PLCs in a Day - vendor PLC exposure |
- From Wire to PLC
- Wearable Robotics — Exoskeletons - made |
- Modern Robotics Specialization
- SLAM lectures
- Sim-to-Real with the SO-101
- LeRobot docs & tutorials - on, end to end ⭐ |
- Introduction to Robotics CS223A
Machine learning for engineers 📖
- Deep Learning
- Dive into Deep Learning
- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
- Probabilistic Machine Learning
- Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications
Robotics 📖
3. The Mechanical Side, Seen From Mechatronics
3.1 Actuation & transmission
- Compact Gearboxes for Modern Robotics: A Review
- Quasi-Direct Drive Actuation for a Lightweight Hip Exoskeleton with High Backdrivability and High Bandwidth - offs.
- Cycloidal Quasi-Direct Drive Actuators with Learning-Based Torque Estimation
- Variable Impedance Actuators: A Review
- SimpleFOC - oriented control on Arduino-class hardware. The fastest way to understand BLDC control by doing.
- ODrive - performance BLDC controllers used across the hobby-to-research spectrum.
- TMotor / CubeMars AK-series - facto QDD actuators for legged robot builds.
3.2 Compliance, contact and impedance
- Series Elastic Actuators
- Backdrivable actuators in robotics
- Mechatronic whole-body co-design of a quadruped robot integrating local compliance
- Drake - rich simulation you can trust.
3.3 Mechanical intelligence & morphological computation 🔬
- Perspectives on Intelligence in Soft Robotics
- Reprogrammable metamaterial robot with embodied versatile computation and mechanical intelligence - wave metamaterials performing analog and logic operations inside a crawling robot.
- The 2024 Active Metamaterials Roadmap - morphing metamaterials as embodied intelligence.
- Exploring Embodied Intelligence in Soft Robotics: A Review
- Morphological design methodologies of soft robots
- Reprogrammable metamaterial robot with embodied versatile computation and mechanical intelligence - wave metamaterials performing analog and logic operations inside a crawling robot.
- Morphological design methodologies of soft robots
3.4 Design, simulation and manufacturing tools
- FreeCAD
- SolidWorks - ins |
- Fusion
- nTop - driven design |
- Ansys
- CalculiX - aster.org/) | FEA solver | 🆓 | Free FEA; usable via FreeCAD FEM workbench |
- OpenModelica - domain sim | 🆓 | The right tool for mechanical+hydraulic+electrical system models |
- Simscape - domain sim | 💵 | The commercial equivalent, tightly coupled to Simulink |
- Blender
- PrusaSlicer - direction strength |
4. Electronics, Embedded & Edge
Edge AI / TinyML
- Edge Impulse - to-end TinyML: data capture → training → C++ export.
- TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers / LiteRT
- MicroFlow - bit MCUs with 2 kB RAM. 📄 paper
- State of Edge AI on Microcontrollers in 2026 - eyed, hype-free assessment; note the trend of silicon vendors absorbing the tooling layer.
- TinyML - cookbook-second-edition/9781837637362) 💵
Electronics design
- KiCad - capable. No reason to pay for hobby or small-team PCB work.
- Fritzing
- Proteus - simulation.
- Falstad Circuit Simulator
- LTspice
- The Art of Electronics
- Practical Electronics for Inventors
Firmware & RTOS
- Zephyr RTOS - neutral, device-tree based, Linux-Foundation governed, huge board support.
- FreeRTOS
- micro-ROS
- PlatformIO - board build system; escape from the Arduino IDE.
- Embassy - hal`](https://github.com/rust-embedded/embedded-hal) 🆓 — async embedded Rust. Increasingly serious for safety-relevant firmware; memory safety without a GC.
- Renode
Microcontrollers & compute
- Arduino
- ESP32 family - Fi/BLE + dual core + enough RAM for micro-ROS |
- Raspberry Pi Pico / RP2350 - time IO | PIO state machines are excellent for encoder decoding and step generation |
- STM32
- Teensy 4.x - rate control loops | 600 MHz Cortex-M7; underrated for 10 kHz+ loops |
- Raspberry Pi 5
- NVIDIA Jetson Orin / Thor - robot policy inference | Thor / T4000 (Blackwell, 2026) is what current VLAs are deployed on |
5. Industrial Automation, Industry 4.0 / 5.0
Connectivity, information models and digital twins
- OPC UA - model standard. Not just a protocol: it's a type system for machines. 🆓 open62541 is the reference open-source stack.
- Asset Administration Shell (AAS) - 1:2023**. The standardised digital twin. 🆓 Eclipse BaSyx and AASX Package Explorer are the tools to start with.
- MQTT
- AutomationML (IEC 62714)
- RAMI 4.0
- open-source reference tooling exists
- Asset Administration Shell in Manufacturing: Applications and Relationship with Digital Twin
Controllers & languages
- IEC 61131-3
- IEC 61499 - driven automation. The intended successor for distributed control; slow adoption but conceptually important. 🔧 Eclipse 4diac 🆓 is the open reference implementation.
- Beremiz - 3.
- CODESYS - neutral runtime behind many PLC brands.
- TwinCAT - based control platform; increasingly the platform where AI-in-automation experiments happen first.
- Siemens TIA Portal / STEP 7
- Programmable Logic Controllers
Simulation & commissioning
- Factory I/O - in-class for learning. 🧪
- NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Omniverse - based digital twins of full production cells.
- Visual Components - US/tecnomatix/products/process-simulate-software/) 💵 — commercial virtual commissioning.
- Ignition
6. The Robotics Software Stack
Kinematics, dynamics & optimisation libraries
- Pinocchio - body dynamics with analytical derivatives. The backbone of most modern whole-body controllers.
- CasADi
- acados
- Crocoddyl - family optimal control for legged/multi-contact robots. 🔬
- OMPL - based motion planning.
- Python Robotics
Perception
- OpenCV
- Open3D
- SAM 2
- FoundationPose - DoF pose estimation for novel objects.
- ORB-SLAM3 - Map](https://introlab.github.io/rtabmap/) 🆓 — visual and RGB-D SLAM.
- Nerfstudio - project/gsplat) 🆓 — NeRF and 3D Gaussian splatting; now used for real-to-sim asset capture.
ROS 2 — current state (as of mid-2026)
Simulation — this changed completely in 2025–2026
- **Newton** - source, GPU-accelerated, differentiable; built on NVIDIA Warp + OpenUSD; developed by NVIDIA + Google DeepMind + Disney Research under the Linux Foundation. v1.0 GA at GTC 2026. Bundles MuJoCo-Warp and Disney's Kamino (closed-loop mechanisms) solvers, SDF collision, hydroelastic contact, and deformables. |
- MuJoCo - rich control research; CPU version remains the easiest to debug |
- MuJoCo Playground - made GPU RL environments |
- Isaac Lab - scale robot learning; v3.0 builds on Newton + PhysX |
- Genesis - platform GPU physics; strong on generative scene creation |
- Gazebo - native system-level simulation; still the right tool for full-robot integration testing |
- Webots
- CoppeliaSim
- SAPIEN - object manipulation research |
Tooling & visualisation
- Foxglove
- Rerun - series visualisation. Excellent for debugging learned policies (log observations, actions and predictions together).
- PlotJuggler - series from a robot or PLC.
- MCAP