Abstract
Nowadays industries need ever-increasing flexibility from automated systems, to dinamically adapt production to market requirements. In this paper a new programming environment, in the application field of factory automated cells, is presented. It allows the user to describe, at object level, the task to be performed into the work-cell and to specify the geometrical structure of manipulation objects, robots, sensors and other devices, which is stored into the Geometrical Data Base in a suitable format. This information is used by the run-time system to build up the virtual cell representation, which to check the task execution on. In this phase the user is supported by a symbolic debugger and a graphic simulator in verifying the full task efficiency. The whole software, divided into three main systems running at different times on a VAXSTATION-3200, was implemented in VAX-Pascal. At present, the environment is customized to perform tasks by means of a PUMA-560 industrial arm.
