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The authorJohn Billingsley is based in the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia

Keywords: Machine vision, Image sensors

Though many writers are happy to put a date on the day a Japanese (or was it a Finn?) coined this rather ungainly word, mechatronics has been around in spirit for many decades.

My first brush with industry nearly half a century ago involved designing autopilots. Their early computing circuits used analogue magnetic amplifiers rather than the digital microcomputer we would expect today. But a machine that trundled through the sky, obeying commands computed from a...