Attempts to construct automated mechanical systems has an interesting history.Actually, the term “auto-mation”was not popularized until the 1940s when it was coined by the Ford Motor Company to denotea process in which a machine transferred a sub-assembly item from one station to another and thenpositioned the item precisely for additionalassembly operations.But successful development of automatedmechanical systems occurred long before then. For example,early applications of automatic control