Book excerpt: The field of mechatronics continues to be the basis for an ever-growing list of products and techniques of great technical and commercial value. Mechatronic design can result in products which are much simpler than their intricate and costly predecessors and can make commonplace the miracles of yesterday. Machine vision has emerged from the laboratory to find real applications in areas, including vehicle guidance, robot control and agriculture. Low-cost cameras have been developed for multimedia applications - but with their ease of interfacing, they offer a whole new field of low-cost vision-based control.