Languages for Sensor-Based Control in Robotics

This book contains the invited contributions to the NATO International Advanced Research Workshop held in Castelvecchio Pascoli, Italy, from September 1-5, 1986. Robot technology is one of the most promising future tools in manufacturing and will have a significant economical impact on the efficient use of production equipment. Experience has shown that this technology is very difficult and expensive to develop. This problem has been recognized and much research is currently being done in various countries in order to obtain fundamental software and hardware tools for robot planning and control. However, the staggering cost of these developments makes a multinational effort necessary to pool resources. The purpose of this workshop is to define the state-of-the-art of languages and related issues for robots and to give recommendations for future research. The papers presented in this workshop have proposed methods and tools for the development of task-oriented programming systems, including geometric modeling, simulation, knowledge-based approaches and motion planning. A final session was devoted to mobile robots. In addition to the lectures, sessions of working groups were organized to discuss selected topics of robotics and to give recommendations for future research work. The reports of the working groups are included in the appendix.