Explicit programming languages in industrial robots

This paper discusses issues of design for software systems for computer controlled manipulators. A short review of the features which have become important in present soft-ware systems for industrial applications is presented, including how various desirable system capabilities can be introduced at reasonable computational costs.The paper is based mainly on the experiences obtained in designing and implementing MAL, a software system for controlling and programming an experimental robot, and VML, a machine independent intermediate language to be used as a target for compliers of high level programming languages for robots.An explanation of how management of multiprocess capabilities, synchronization of different devices, error handling and other desirable features can be inserted in a simple system, implemented on micro and minicomputers and made suitable for industrial applications will be shown.     

System software for computer-aided design in electronics on a small machine

A minicomputer installation dedicated to c.a.d. is described. The economy and flexibility of such systems when incorporating comprehensive graphics facilities is stressed. Suitable operating systems are discussed, including an executive program to provide software simulation of three virtual computers (each virtual machine may then run under an independent operating system). Features of the graphical system software are outlined, including device and machine independence, flexibility, ease of use and economy. The applications programming philosophy required is described together with several interactive programs developed for use in electronics design. These programs, used by electronic engineers and research scientists over the past four years, illustrate the flexibility inherent in the system.     

Integrated system for hypothesis testing: Software and algorithms

Conclusion The intelligent hypothesis testing system SVH has been implemented in an integrated CASE APS environment for software system development by structured-modular composition programming [13]. The use of CASE APS for this purpose has proved highly productive and promising, because this support system ensures software development along the life cycle spiral, i.e., it supports all technological processes from software design to operation and upgrading. These support tools are intended for applied programmers, and are sufficiently simple to learn and use. The CASE APS environment also provides support tools for efficient implementation of knowledge and data bases for the constructed applications, including SVH. Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 5, pp. 50–58, September–October, 1997.     

Intelligent welding system technologies: State-of-the-art review and perspectives

Welding systems are being transformed by the advent of modern information technologies such as the internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent welding systems (IWS), making use of these technologies, are drawing attention from academic and industrial communities. Intelligent welding is the use of computers to mimic, strengthen, and/or replace human operators in sensing, learning, decision-making, monitoring and control, etc. This is accomplished by integrating the advantages of humans and physical systems into intelligent cyber systems. While intelligent welding has found pilot applications in industry, a systematic analysis of its components, applications, and future directions will help provide a unified definition of intelligent welding systems. This paper examines fundamental components and techniques necessary to make welding systems intelligent, including sensing and signal processing, feature extraction and selection, modeling, decision-making, and learning. Emerging technologies and their application potential to IWS will also be surveyed, including Industry 4.0, cyber-physical system (CPS), digital twins, etc. Typical applications in IWS will be surveyed, including weld design, task sequencing, robot path planning, robot programming, process monitoring and diagnosis, prediction, process control, quality inspection and assessment, human-robot collaboration, and virtual welding. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for future development will be proposed. This review is intended to provide a reference of the state-of-the-art for those seeking to introduce intelligent welding capabilities as they modernize their traditional welding stations, systems, and factories.     

Improving the virtualization of rich applications by combining VNC and streaming protocols at the hypervisor layer

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions seek to provide a satisfactory user experience at the client side when accessing remote desktop applications, even from mobile devices with limited capabilities. This paper presents a new approach, improving on previous work by the authors, in which a combination of Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and streaming protocols allowed efficient remote web access to virtualized applications within a cloud architecture. The new approach simplifies virtual machine templates, from which virtual machine instances are deployed, by centralizing software modules, greatly simplifying their management. Our new contribution consists of an integrated solution with specific WebM video encoding modules in charge of application visual output processing, an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming server, and a VNC server. The solution can be installed in the hypervisor of the host machines instead of replicating the servers and modules throughout the guest (virtual) machines that run the virtualized applications. Consequently, their implementations are unique and independent of the operating system of the virtual machines. In short, it is not necessary to provide different implementations for different operating systems, which reduces the complexity of virtual machine templates and greatly simplies platform management. To demonstrate our solution, we have modified the Quick Emulator (QEMU)‐Kernel‐based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor source code accordingly. We also present qualitative and quantitative analyses that demonstrate that the new approach is advantageous in terms of software management and quality of experience, compared with our previous work and other well‐known thin clients, contributing to the enhancement of VDI systems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Data-Intensive Cloud Computing: Requirements, Expectations, Challenges, and Solutions

Data-intensive systems encompass terabytes to petabytes of data. Such systems require massive storage and intensive computational power in order to execute complex queries and generate timely results. Further, the rate at which this data is being generated induces extensive challenges of data storage, linking, and processing. A data-intensive cloud provides an abstraction of high availability, usability, and efficiency to users. However, underlying this abstraction, there are stringent requirements and challenges to facilitate scalable and resourceful services through effective physical infrastructure, smart networking solutions, intelligent software tools, and useful software approaches. This paper analyzes the extensive requirements which exist in data-intensive clouds, describes various challenges related to the paradigm, and assess numerous solutions in meeting these requirements and challenges. It provides a detailed study of the solutions and analyzes their capabilities in meeting emerging needs of widespread applications.     

Concepts,methods, and languages for building timely intelligent systems

We describe the ABE/RT toolkit—a set of design, development, and experimentation tools for building time-stressed intelligent systems-and its use for the Lockheed Pilot's Associate application. We use the termtimely systems to refer to systems with hard real-time requirements for interacting with a human operator or other agents with similar time-scales. The ABE/RT methodology is based on a philosophy of rigorous engineering design in which the application developer works to guarantee the system's timeliness by identifying the various events which require timely responses, determining the worst-case frequencies of these events and the deadlines and durations of the tasks that respond to the events, and then verifying that the run-time system has enough processing resources to complete all mandatory taks by their deadlines. We believe this is the only way in the near-term to build complex real-time intelligent systems that will be reliable enough for critical applications with demanding users. The ABE/RT Toolkit contains a set of languages for specifying the structure and behavior of timely systems, together with tools to simulate those models, log and analyze data collected during simulation runs, predict an application's performance on a specified target hardware architecture, and deploy the application on the target architecture.This research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1400 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22209, under contracts F30602-85-C-0135 and F33615-85-C-3804, administered by the Air Force Systems Command, Rome Air Development Center and the Air Force Cockpit Technology Directorate, Wright Research and Development Center, respectively. Use of this material, including copying, by the U.S. government is permitted in accordance with the terms of those contracts.     

A theoretical framework for an intelligent design catalogue

Product catalogues constitute a valuable source of information for engineers engaged in design activities. Unfortunately, these catalogues provide only limited support to engineers in the earlier, conceptual stages of design. This research proposes the intelligent design catalogue consisting of a virtual design environment linked to catalogues of standard components. Engineers develop their design concepts within the virtual environment and refer to the catalogues as these concepts are refined. The selected components are assembled within the design environment. The intelligent design catalogue provides search aids as well as assessment tools. The theoretical framework draws on several engineering areas. Manufacturing demonstrates how process plans can be developed in a virtual environment independently of the machines on the shop floor just as products can be conceptually designed independently of the standard components available. The standard components themselves can be grouped borrowing from classification schemes of group technology. Object-oriented programming (OOP) provides an environment for the development of the software that runs the intelligent design catalogue. As the objects of OOP parallel standard components, OOP also serves as a design paradigm after which the catalogue can be modelled. Design theory suggests frameworks for developing a (semi-) hierarchical structure for cataloguing parts.     

Heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing

Heterogeneous network-based distributed and parallel computing is gaining increasing acceptance as an alternative or complementary paradigm to multiprocessor-based parallel processing as well as to conventional supercomputing. While algorithmic and programming aspects of heterogeneous concurrent computing are similar to their parallel processing counterparts, system issues, partitioning and scheduling, and performance aspects are significantly different. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of heterogeneous concurrent computing, in the context of the parallel virtual machine (PVM) system, a widely adopted software system for network computing. In particular, we highlight the system level infrastructures that are required, aspects of parallel algorithm development that most affect performance, system capabilities and limitations, and tools and methodologies for effective computing in heterogeneous networked environments. We also present recent developments and experiences in the PVM project, and comment on ongoing and future work.     

Development of a novel cloud-based multi-tenant model creation service for automatic virtual metrology

AVM (Automatic Virtual Metrology) is the highest-level technology for VM (Virtual Metrology) applications from the perspective of automation. Its various automatic capabilities could facilitate fast factory-wide deployment and operations of VM systems. AVM systems have been successfully applied to the semiconductor, TFT-LCD, solar-cell, and machining industries for on-line monitoring the production quality of workpieces. However, in its past industrial applications, the model creation (MC) functionality of the existing AVM system encountered several limitations, such as being a standalone application and confined to be used in situ in a factory, no support for multiuser model creation, wasting computing resources, etc., which could diminish the applicability of the existing AVM system in current global and distributed manufacturing environments. Thus, this paper is dedicated to tackling the problem of how to systematically and effectively overcome MC-related limitations of the existing AVM system so that it can robustly support multiple users across factories to create their VM models simultaneously in distributed manufacturing settings. By leveraging the advantages of cloud computing and several IT technologies (including virtualization software, XML, Web Service, Multi-tenancy technique, and HTML5), this paper proposes a novel cloud-based multi-tenant model creation service (i.e., CMMCS) for AVM. The proposed CMMCS contains a cloud-based system architecture, functional frameworks of its key components, several functional mechanisms, and HTML5-based Web GUIs. Testing results in an industrial case study that creates VM models using the CMMCS for CNC machine tools in machining wheel rims of automobiles in a factory in Taiwan demonstrate that the CMMCS can allow multiple users from different tenants to simultaneously create their VM models, while enabling the MC cloud services to be more robust for processing MC requests, having higher CPU-usage rates in the underlying virtual machines, and achieving better cross-platform usage, compared to the original MC functionality. This paper has provided a feasible solution to systematically and effectively remedying the MC-related limitations of the existing AVM system. The existing VM-related literature mainly focused on the development of VM models. To our knowledge, no papers have coped with issues addressed in this paper by leveraging cloud computing. The results of this paper can be a useful reference for industrial practitioners to construct AVM systems which support multi-tenant or multiuser model creation.     

支持硬件透明编程模型的动态可重构系统的设计与实现*

以Java作为可重构系统描述语言,提出了一种方法级的硬件透明编程模型,给出了硬件方法封装方式和软硬件方法动态链接过程。程序设计者调用软件方法进行应用开发,虚拟机根据软硬件划分结果动态加载并链接相应的硬件方法,从而达到简化编译器和综合工具以及屏蔽底层物理细节的目的。实验结果表明上述编程模型能够支持硬件透明编程,同时系统性能得到了明显的改善。     

Fine-grained visualization pipelines and lazy functional languages

The pipeline model in visualization has evolved from a conceptual model of data processing into a widely used architecture for implementing visualization systems. In the process, a number of capabilities have been introduced, including streaming of data in chunks, distributed pipelines, and demand-driven processing. Visualization systems have invariably built on stateful programming technologies, and these capabilities have had to be implemented explicitly within the lower layers of a complex hierarchy of services. The good news for developers is that applications built on top of this hierarchy can access these capabilities without concern for how they are implemented. The bad news is that by freezing capabilities into low-level services expressive power and flexibility is lost. In this paper we express visualization systems in a programming language that more naturally supports this kind of processing model. Lazy functional languages support fine-grained demand-driven processing, a natural form of streaming, and pipeline-like function composition for assembling applications. The technology thus appears well suited to visualization applications. Using surface extraction algorithms as illustrative examples, and the lazy functional language Haskell, we argue the benefits of clear and concise expression combined with fine-grained, demand-driven computation. Just as visualization provides insight into data, functional abstraction provides new insight into visualization.     

Hybreed: A software framework for developing context-aware hybrid recommender systems

This article introduces Hybreed, a software framework for building complex context-aware applications, together with a set of components that are specifically targeted at developing hybrid, context-aware recommender systems. Hybreed is based on a concept for processing context that we call dynamic contextualization. The underlying notion of context is very generic, enabling application developers to exploit sensor-based physical factors as well as factors derived from user models or user interaction. This approach is well aligned with context definitions that emphasize the dynamic and activity-oriented nature of context. As an extension of the generic framework, we describe Hybreed RecViews, a set of components facilitating the development of context-aware and hybrid recommender systems. With Hybreed and RecViews, developers can rapidly develop context-aware applications that generate recommendations for both individual users and groups. The framework provides a range of recommendation algorithms and strategies for producing group recommendations as well as templates for combining different methods into hybrid recommenders. Hybreed also provides means for integrating existing user or product data from external sources such as social networks. It combines aspects known from context processing frameworks with features of state-of-the-art recommender system frameworks, aspects that have been addressed only separately in previous research. To our knowledge, Hybreed is the first framework to cover all these aspects in an integrated manner. To evaluate the framework and its conceptual foundation, we verified its capabilities in three different use cases. The evaluation also comprises a comparative assessment of Hybreed’s functional features, a comparison to existing frameworks, and a user study assessing its usability for developers. The results of this study indicate that Hybreed is intuitive to use and extend by developers.     

The role of expert systems in producing log interpretation software

Abstract: Log interpretation science is a controversial and rapidly changing domain. Designing interpretation models is a highly experimental process which involves trials with a computer program as an integral part of the design. Therefore conventional software engineering techniques, which require a complete specification of the problem before the program is written, are often not applicable or fail to produce high quality software. The development of expert systems has provided the techniques, tools, and capabilities to let us seek alternate methods to produce log interpretation software: exploratory programming environments and automatic programming systems. An exploratory programming environment combines the power of interactive graphics and programming tools to merge the design and programming tasks into a single process where model and program develop together. An automatic programming system will embody the knowledge of the programming process and of some log interpretation heuristics to produce log processing programs from interactive specifications expressed in familiar terms. These facilities will allow log interpretation model designers, who are non-computer specialists, to produce high quality software as the end result of a model design.     

Model-based codesign

Hardware-software codesign has been a research topic since the beginning of this decade (1990s), but only now are structured methods emerging that focus on automating design. Unfortunately, to date most codesign approaches leverage performance from individual hardware and software tools, rather than enforcing a structured integration of hardware and software systems simultaneously. A few frameworks have successfully done this integration and have the potential for significant benefits, including reduced time to market, smaller scale design, better likelihood of component reuse, and maximum use of processing power. The article describes a codesign approach that lets developers create models of a formal system representation independently of the hardware and software implementation. The authors' framework, which targets embedded systems, lets developers use simulation based modeling to explore the feasibility of virtual prototypes and then interactively map the specification onto a software-hardware architecture     

A real-time virtual machine implementation for small microcontrollers

A way to host a full general purpose virtual machine (VM) interpreter on a very small microcontroller platform is described. This machine provides a comprehensive set of general and enhanced functionality efficiently by abstracting the VM instruction set. Measurements were made on the execution of software programs in the virtual machine while running on the target platform in order to demonstrate the machine??s capabilities. Additionally, multitasking capabilities were added to the baseline and found to perform efficiently within the VM. The results proved to be satisfactory and demonstrate that a robust virtual machine can be made available for very small embedded platforms based on simple microcontrollers, such as those that are widely found in aerospace applications.     

Program development and coding on a fine-grained vision machine

The advantages of programmable massively parallel fine-grained machines for vision applications are well known. During the design of a new one, the study of its behavior and performance (through simulation) is paramount to achieve optimum tailoring. Furthermore, software development demands convenient tools to achieve maximum results from the machine capabilities and the efforts of the programmer.In this paper we focus our attention on programming environments at the machine level for massively parallel homogeneous systems, and more specifically, we present the one that we have developed for the pyramidal PAPIA2 machine, including tools for program development, result monitoring and the visual editing of codes. The synergic approach of combining a hardware simulator and a group of graphical tools is a new, easy, and effective means of creating and testing primitives in the early stages of system development.     

Knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation with class: the object-oriented paradigm

Knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation are the fundamental building blocks of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). How to efficiently elicit knowledge from experts and transform this elicited knowledge into a machine usable format is a significant and time consuming problem for KBS developers. Object-orientation provides several solutions to persistent knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation problems including transportability, knowledge reuse, and knowledge growth. An automated graphical knowledge acquisition tool is presented, based upon object-oriented principles. The object-oriented graphical interface provides a modeling platform that is easily understood by experts and knowledge engineers. The object-oriented base for the automated KA tool provides a representation independent methodology that can easily be mapped into any other object-oriented expert system or other object-oriented intelligent tools.