Object description with a manipulator

This paper presents an interactive system, called POINTY. The goal of this system is to solve problems encountered when a high‐level manipulator lanaguage, as AL, is employed. Those problems are related to the necessity of supplying any manipulation program with a complete description of the objects involved. The object description has an important role in any task description oriented language. In these languages the procedural part, which expresses the assembly steps, is reduced by increasing correspondently the descriptive part, which expresses the knowledge a program has about the physical world. An approach to the generation of object models is presented, and the system based on it is illustrated. The basic idea is to point to the objects with the manipulator for building an incremental model of the world, and then to generate the AL corresponding instructions. The preliminary experiences using it demonstrate that the object model part of an AL program can be easily obtained and tested.