The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Robotics was held in Columbus, Ohio, U. S. A. on June 13th to 15th, 1989. The first two conferences in this series were held in Tokyo. The third was held in Versailles, France in October 1987. The International Conference on Advanced Robotics is affiliated with the International Federation of Robotics. This conference was sponsored by The Ohio State University. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers was a cooperating co-sponsor. The objective of the International Conference on Advanced Robotics is to provide an international exchange of...

This volume, Mechanical Design: Theory and Methodology, has been put together over the past four years. Most of the work is ongoing as can be ascertained easily from the text. One can argue that this is so for any text or monograph. Any such book is only a snapshot in time, giving information about the state of knowledge of the authors when the book was compiled. The chapters have been updated and are representative of the state of the art in the field of design theory and methodology. It is barely over a decade that design as an area of study was revived, mostly at the behest of industry,...