HERE are many people that I would like to thank for their help and support to help me become the person that I am today. Foremost, I must acknowledge my adviser Dr. Simon for always leading by example, through his hard work and ethical and optimal decision making skills. I am forever grateful to him for his mentoring style of encouraging investigative thinking and allowing us the freedom to do research. It gives me great pleasure in acknowledging the support and help of all my committee members, Dr. Hizlan, Dr. Richter, Dr. Sikder and Dr. Shao for all their suggestions and recommendations. Special thanks to Dawei Du, Rick Rarick, George Thomas, Berney Montavon, Paul Lozovyy and all of the remaining past and present members of the Embedded Controls Lab. Being part of a team that solves real-world problems has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Also, many thanks to our industrial partners, including Jeff Abell from General Motors, Nick Mastandrea from Innovative Developments and Arun Venkatesan from Cleveland Medical Polymers, for working with us on these projects. I consider it an honor to work with my fellow engineers at ARCON Corporation. I am indebted to them for encouraging me the complete my research. Last, but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to my family, especially my parents Güngör and Dr. Yalçın Ergezer. I could not achieve this without their unconditional love, encouragement and guidance. I must also thank Slava and her parents for welcoming me and tolerating me through this long adventure and for providing me with the much needed relief from the technical world.