Automatic Programming System Research Articles

System Evolving using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Problem statement: The goal of automatic programming system is to create, in an automated way, a computer program that enables a computer to solve a problem. It is difficult to build an automatic programming system: They require carefully designed specification languages and an intimate knowledge base. Determine the relevance of mathematical system theory to the problems of automatic programming and find automatic programming methodology, where a computer program evolved to solve problem by using problem’s input output specifications only. Approach: Problem behavior was described as a finite state automata based on its meaning, also problem’s input-output specifications were described in theoretical manner, based on its input and output trajectories information, then a program was evolved to solve the problem. Different implementation languages can be used without significantly affecting existing problem specification. Evolutionary process adapts ant colony optimization algorithm to find good finite state automata that efficiently satisfies input-output specifications. Results: By moving from state to states, each ant incrementally constructs sub-solution in an iterative process. The algorithm converged to the optimal final solution, by accumulating most effective sub-solutions; main problem will appeared in solving problem with little input-output specifications. Fixed and dynamic input-output specifications were used to mimic chaotic behavior of real world. Conclusion: These results indicated that theoretical bases can enhance efficiency and performance of automatic programming system, leading to an increase in the system productivity and letting the concentrate to be done on problem specification only. Also, the collective behavior emerging from the interaction of the different ants had proved effective in solving problem; finally, in dynamic input-output specification chaos theory, especially “butterfly effect”, can be used to control the sensitivity to initial configuration of trajectory information.

Research on NC Manufacturing Technique of Double Conical Screw

Conical screw rotor is the key part of conical double-screw extruder, with complex geometrical features, such as variable outside and inside diameter, unequal groove depth, varied head and lead. The manufacturing process is complicated and difficult. The precision and efficiency of conventional machining method is lower, the mating character of machined screw rotor is bad and the exchangeability is hard. On the basis of studying the geometric character and contacting process of double conical screw, this paper presents a new NC manufacturing method to envelope milling screw rotor with several axes moving combined. The automatic programming system for screw rotor NC machining is developed. This research increases the machining level of conical double screw. It has conspicuous engineering meaning.

Research on NC Manufacturing Technique of Double Conical Screw

Conical screw rotor is the key part of conical double-screw extruder, with complex geometrical features, such as variable outside and inside diameter, unequal groove depth, varied head and lead. The manufacturing process is complicated and difficult. The precision and efficiency of conventional machining method is lower, the mating character of machined screw rotor is bad and the exchangeability is hard. On the basis of studying the geometric character and contacting process of double conical screw, this paper presents a new NC manufacturing method to envelope milling screw rotor with several axes moving combined. The automatic programming system for screw rotor NC machining is developed. This research increases the machining level of conical double screw. It has conspicuous engineering meaning.

Development of Knowledge Capture and Automatic Programming System

Development of Knowledge Capture and Automatic Programming System

Research on Kinematic Analysis and Post Processing Arithmetic for NC Machine Tool for Bonnet Tool Polishing

Bonnet tool polishing, combined traditional optical polishing technique with modern NC technology, is an novel optical polishing technique. As the motion control and material removal process is different from metal cutting NC machine tool, the NC programming for bonnet tool polishing NC machine tools cannot be carried out with commercial CAM software. This paper analyses the kinematics of feed mechanism and precession mechanism using coordinate transformation method and sets up the feed and precession kinematics equations. The arithmetic of post processing applied to NC automatic programming system is proposed according to kinematics equations and detail bonnet tool polishing technique.

A Framework for CAD- and Sensor-Based Robotic Coating Automation

Coating automation of a complex product family with changes and uncertainties is investigated. A CAD- and scanner-based robotic coating system is proposed. Its software system consists of a data-processing system and automatic programming and simulation system. The data processing system is capable of generating accurate surface model from points-cloud and/or as-designed CAD model. The automatic programming and simulation system is capable of creating robot programs based on the surface models. In this paper, the system framework and the methodology for generating robot programs are focused

From FORTRAN 77 to Locality‐Aware High Productivity Languages for Peta‐Scale Computing

When the first specification of the FORTRAN language was released in 1956, the goal was to provide an "automatic programming system" that would enhance the economy of programming by replacing assembly language with a notation closer to the domain of scientific programming. A key issue in this context, explicitly recognized by the authors of the language, was the requirement to produce efficient object programs that could compete with their hand‐coded counterparts. More than 50 years later, a similar situation exists with respect to finding the right programming paradigm for high performance computing systems. FORTRAN, as the traditional language for scientific programming, has played a major role in the quest for high‐productivity programming languages that satisfy very strict performance constraints. This paper focuses on high‐level support for locality awareness, one of the most important requirements in this context. The discussion centers on the High Performance Fortran (HPF) family of languages, and their influence on current language developments for peta‐scale computing. HPF is a data‐parallel language that was designed to provide the user with a high‐level interface for programming scientific applications, while delegating to the compiler the task of generating an explicitly parallel message‐passing program. We outline developments that led to HPF, explain its major features, identify a set of weaknesses, and discuss subsequent languages that address these problems. The final part of the paper deals with Chapel, a modern object‐oriented language developed in the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program sponsored by DARPA. A salient property of Chapel is its general framework for the support of user‐defined distributions, which is related in many ways to ideas first described in Vienna Fortran. This framework is general enough to allow a concise specification of sparse data distributions. The paper concludes with an outlook to future research in this area.

Fortran Programming Language and Scientific Programming: 50 Years of Mutual Growth

This special issue of Scientific Programming is devoted to celebration of fifty years of mutual and remarkable growth of both scientific programming and its primary language, Fortran. In this brief introduction, we will remark on the past, the present and the future of Fortran and summarize the papers included in this issue. Although the first specification of the Fortran language was released in 1956, IBM delivered its first compiler for its computer, IBM model 704, in 1957, hence this year marks the 50 anniversary of introduction of Fortran to users. The language was designed by John Backus and his colleagues at IBM with the goal to reduce the cost of programming scientific applications by providing an “automatic programming system” to replace assembly language with a notation closer to the scientific programming domain. As the computer technology has been evolving from a single computer, to parallel computers of different kinds, to multi-core processors, clusters and grids, the Fortran language has been evolving as well with the same goal of reducing the cost of programming without sacrificing efficiency. Over the years, the common standard emerged first, followed by a series of revisions. This process continues as the most recent development of a revision, scheduled for 2008, is under way. Yet, care has been taken at each revision to preserve, to the greatest extent possible, compatibility with previous versions to ensure correct recompilation of legacy codes. As a result, each revision includes only a fraction of the proposed new facilities, allowing the ideas for changes to mature before they are accepted. Over half of the century of its existence, the evolving Fortran has been the traditional and major language for scientific programming and it has played a significant role in the research on programming languages and compilers for scientific computing. The vibrant user community, the wellestablished committee overseeing its evolution and the process for revisions of the language ensure the significant role for Fortran in scientific programming in the immediate future and are likely to continue to secure Fortran’s relevance for many years to come. The first article in this issue, entitled “Scientific programming in Fortran” has been prepared by W. Van Snyder. The author provides a historical perspective on the development of various, progressively more modern, versions of Fortran, starting with the first standard developed by ANSI predecessor, ASA, and introduced in 1966. The article briefly describes the essence of revisions to these standards introduced in 1977, 1990, 1995 and most recently in 2003. Then, the author briefly discusses revisions being prepared for the 2008 standard release and remarks: “Of the thousands of programming languages invented, only a dozen or so have been sufficiently widely used to have had international standards, and only four of those have had revisions that attempted to keep up with language technology while preserving software investments by maintaining compatibility with previous editions: Fortran, Cobol, Ada and C . . . The temperament of the Fortran committees and community, at least at present, is that there will be future developments, which will maintain, and probably enhance, the suitability of Fortran for scientific programming.” This clearly shows how unusual the longevity and vitality of Fortran have been.

Process modeling for robotic polishing

This paper presents the solutions adopted for a robotic polishing cell for mold manufacturing. Mold finishing is frequently carried out manually; these kinds of operations are iterative, time consuming and require experience. Automation can introduce cost reduction minimizing production times on such manual finishing operations. The research shown in this paper provides an overall solution without discarding aspects that could be relevant to the task considered in the mold making environment. Most of the mold makers usually employ CAD/CAM systems in order to design workpieces and to prepare the CNC programs to manufacture the parts, this CAD data can also be used to prepare programs for the actual robot finishing of these parts. In this work, an automatic planning and programming system based on data from a CAD system is described. The direct use of the paths implies difficulties of adaptation mostly when free-shaped surfaces are treated, so that the use of a constant contact force control has also been considered. To accomplish the automation of the process it is necessary to establish a behavior model of the system’s variables. This fact allows the definition of the task specifications of the tools and, as a result, both the planning system and the control strategy by stages of the polishing process.

1437 DSMC 法の自動プログラミングシステム

The automatic programming system has been developed to make a fortran source code for any application of the DSMC method. This system consists of the data collection part and the programming part. Input conditions such as boundary conditions can be set on computer screen by GUI. A display of animation under calculation and a simple display of result after simulation are available. A program can be corrected later by hand because this system makes a fortran source code. This can apply to two dimensional, axisymmetric and three-dimensional problems.

Automatic Programming System for Shipyard Robots

The application of robots to variable tasks in unstructured environments presents a series of problems that must be solved in order to achieve viable results Common teaching-type robots cannot be applied in these cases as the programming time and labor investment far exceed the time and cost of direct manual production. Numerically controlled (NC) robots programmed off-line by modified NC methods have been applied with economic success to program robots directly from computer-aided design (CAD) data where tasks are sufficiently repetitive and the operating environment is sufficiently structured Similarly, off-line programming systems have been developed by various robot manufacturers to generate instructions from CAD data for their robots. Likewise, developers of 3D simulation software have devised methods to merge CAD data with physical models of robots and system hardware to produce robot path programs that approximate the tasks to be performed. Each of these systems is unable to provide a totally automated means to program robot tasks directly from CAD data due to inaccuracies in the real-world elements and/or the models, and due to a lack of knowledge about the processes. A new approach to automatic robot programming is needed that is capable of dealing with:inherent differences between the CAD models and the real-world parts;uncertainties regarding the precise location and accessibility of the parts relative to the robot:process knowledge required to adapt these differences and uncertainties; andprocess knowledge essential to optimizing robot activities. Such an automatic robot programming system is being developed to meet the dual-use defense and commercial ship construction needs of American shipyards under the Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP) for Shipbuilding Robotics. This system automates the programmer's task of identifying location of welds, assigning weld process parameters and adaptive welding strategies to each joint. A procedural diagram for this system is shown in Figure 1. The results and benefits of this approach are described herein. Fig. 1Procedure for automatic off-line robot task planning

From CAD-based kinematic modeling to automated robot programming

The objective of this work is twofold: firstly, to present the potential of CAD-based techniques with respect to implementing a user-friendly tool for systematic and efficient kinematic modeling and analysis of general assembly products, and secondly, to detail the significance of this approach for the development of a Robotic Assembly Language Planning Hierarchy (RALPH), a task-level automatic robot programming system. With the Product Assembly Modeler (PAM) as the environment for kinematic modeling, the geometric and topological information in the system's database is utilized to derive and solve the kinematic equations that characterize a mechanism. Spatial relationships play a central role in this process as they represent the kinematic constraints implied by the joints. The advantages of embedding kinematic analysis in PAM comprise the fleidbility of modeling open and closed loop mechanisms, the visual study of motion of a mechanism, and the evaluation of the integrity of the design. PAM also provides the geometric and topological data for RALPH to generate a process plan for robotic assembly. CAD-based kinematic modeling and analysis plays a key role with respect to automated programming of industrial robots due to the importance of the inverse kinematic problem.

Reducing Effect on Amount of Interpolation Data for Curve Contour Using Optimum Circular Interpolation.

We compared the results of the optimum circular interpolation with those of the clothoid interpolation and the automatical circular interpolation function in the Maple NC automatic programming system, for three types of contour: an ellipse, an involute and a parallel index cam profile. The amount of interpolation data obtained by the optimum circular interpolation is less than that obtained by the Maple system. In particular, the reducing effect becomes obvious for a contour curve with a steep change in radius of curvature. Although the optimum circular interpolation is slightly more disadvantageous than the clothoid interpolation in terms of the amount of interpolation data, it is very practical and useful because the interpolation data can be directly applied in a general NC machine tool and the interpolation data for any offset curve can be direct obtained from those for the original curve.

Automatic process design from nonprocedural specification

AbstractThere are very few systems for automatic process designing despite its importance in the middle software development phase. A theory for designing a process flow depending on the functional dependency between a data item and the structure of the data was postulated and an automatic process design system ECS/P was then developed. EOS/P inputs a nonprocedural specification of business data processing, wherein the relationship between attributes of entities and associations are represented as a set of equations. These attributes are modified here by identifiers of entities and associations. These modifications may be single‐step or multistep by way of associations. The purpose of EOS/P is to generate specifications, each of which can perform the required process without storing the intermediate results in outer files. Therefore, the first EOS/P creates for each multistep modification merged files that include both the modifier entity and the modified entity; then by using these files a series of single‐step modified process specifications equivalent to the given multistep modified specification are generated. Furthermore, in this transformation, appropriate intermediate files are created when order‐clash and structure‐clash are detected in files. The finally generated specifications can be transformed automatically into COBOL programs by our previously proposed automatic module design system EOS/M and automatic programming system SPACE.

Representation of weld features and attributes in solid models to support automatic programming of arc welding robots

Contemporary solid modellers are incapable of storing explicitly product and process definitions of weld features. This work presents a paradigm to develop a computer-aided engineering environment that supports complete weld feature information in a solid model and create an automatic programming system for robotic are welding. Welding features are treated as properties or attributes of an object features which are portions of the object surface—the topological boundary. The structure for representing the features and attributes is called the welding attribute graph. The method associates appropriate weld features to geometric primitives, adds welding attributes, and checks the validity of welding specifications. A systematic structure is provided to incorporate welding attributes and coordinate system information in a CSG tree. The specific implementation of this structure using a hybrid solid modeller (IDEAS) and an object-orientated programming environment is described. An outstanding application of we...

Knowledge representation in an automatic programming system and solution of Ek(R2) location problems

The specific features of the solver system for the Ek(R2) problem of locating geometrical objects are presented. A strategy for the construction of the system as a mapping of the set of problems on the set of solution methods is proposed.

An integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system based on form feature oriented product model

Form feature based product modelling technique is the basis of integration of CIMS information system. On this basis, an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM prototype system called HFCIM has been developed by authors. Some main principles used in this system will be discussed. At first, the structure of product model is described in section 2. In section 3, The feature based product modelling system is described. A prototype process planning expert system is described in section 4. The principles of automatic NC programming system based on product model is described in section 5.

NC programming and machining of sculptured surfaces

A three-dimensional automatic NC programming system is presented. To make the system for general purpose use, a classification of geometric models is developed and described in detail. The strategy and algorithm of matching B-Spline curves with COONS surface is proposed here.

NC programming and machining of sculptured surfaces

A three-dimensional automatic NC programming system is presented. To make the system for general purpose use, a classification of geometric models is developed and described in detail. The strategy and algorithm of matching B-Spline curves with COONS surface is proposed here.

Knowledge representations for the automatic generation of numerical simulators for PDEs

In this paper we describe an automatic programming (AP) system which generates numerical discretization schemes for partial differential equation (PDE) problems. This system is based on the observation that a wide variety of discretization schemes can be mechanically produced by computing surface integrals of spacetime currents. However, surface integration is difficult to carry out using conventional vector calculus. For this reason, the system is structured to include the differential geometry formalisms which make high dimensional surface integration simple. The differential geometry formalisms have also simplified the representation of continuous physics problems and increased the domain of applicability of the system.