The Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL) is a division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its function is to work with companies and perform research to improve manufacturing performance. Because of its broad scope, MEL has five divisions -- Precision Engineering, Manufacturing Metrology, Intelligent Systems, Manufacturing Systems Integration, and Fabrication Technology....

The Alpha Lab at the University of California at Berkeley researches and develops robotics systems for high-precision manufacturing. Specifically, it combines mathematical algorithms and industrial automation to build low-cost, reliable tools for "feeding, fixturing and grasping." The projects section of the lab's Web site describes a number of experiments and model implementations for robotics...