This book brings together four contributions spanning that range, from the mathematics of learned control laws through to a surgical manipulator that must place an instrument within a fraction of a millimetre while returning meaningful tactile information to the surgeon. Control and robotics are the two faces of the same mechatronic problem. A controller decides what a machine should do next; a robot is the machine that must do it, in contact with an uncertain world and, increasingly, with people.

A shared concern runs through them: intelligence in a mechatronic system is only useful if it can be trusted and executed. The opening chapter develops machine learning for real-time control from first principles and insists throughout that a learned model must satisfy a hard timing deadline, admit a stability argument and sit behind a verified safety filter before it can be deployed. The surgical robotics chapter treats safety architecture and regulatory evidence as engineering requirements rather than afterthoughts. The chapter on symbolic analysis takes the opposite route to the same end, deriving closed-form transfer functions so that behaviour can be understood analytically rather than inferred from simulation output.

The book closes on diagnosis, with a review of vibration-based fault diagnosis that is unusually candid about its own field's evaluation practices. Read together, the four chapters describe a discipline in which learning, analysis and mechanism design are complementary rather than competing, each developed in enough depth to be used.

Dr. Hamed Mobki holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, together with two master’s degrees, one in Mechanical Engineering and the other in Electrical Engineering with a specialisation in Control, and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. He previously served as a researcher at GUtech Oman, in collaboration with RWTH Aachen. He currently holds the position of Researcher and Condition Monitoring Specialist at the West Azerbaijan Power Generation Management Company and the Urmia Combined Cycle Power Plant. His research interests encompass a broad spectrum of topics within mechanical and mechatronic engineering, including condition monitoring, vibration and control analysis, and the dynamics of complex systems.

Dr. Aydin Azizi holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a specialisation in Mechatronics, an M.Sc. in Mechatronics, and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an official instructor for the Siemens Mechatronic Systems Certification Program (SMSCP), and an editor-in-chief of the Emerging Trends in Mechatronics book series published by Springer Nature. He currently serves as a senior lecturer and the Academic Partnership Liaison Manager at Oxford Brookes University. His current research focuses on investigating and developing novel techniques to model, control, and optimise complex systems, with expertise in control and automation, artificial intelligence, and simulation techniques.

Dr. Morteza Mohammadzaheri is currently an associate professor and head of the Engineering Department at German University of Technology in Oman. He received his Ph.D. in Intelligent Control Systems from the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests are mostly on the application of artificial intelligence in the control, modelling, and optimisation of engineering systems.