Acknowledgments

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Many thanks go to Gerry Wentworth of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity for his assistance making the prototypes tested in the thesis. Without him, the prototypes would still be large blocks of metal sitting on my desk.

I would also like to thank Chun-Yuan Gu of ABB Corporate Research and Torgny Brogardh and Christer Lundstrom of ABB Robotics for making the project possible and providing help along the way.

Final thanks go to Alec Robertson who was our interface to the ABB Corporation. His many, many, many lengthy emails were both useful and entertaining.