Development of Integration in Manufacturing: Interoperability of CAD Standards and Robotics in CIME

Current international developments in the broad field of Product Data Technology are advancing rapidly and are leading up to new levels of technology in product model definition, product model communications, enterprise integration and cooperation. These developments will be of strategic significance to all manufacturing industries.International standardization based on the product model definition standard STEP (ISO10303) is playing a key role in promoting a modern approach to Product Data Technology. The initial release of STEP, consisting of twelve essential parts, has recently been approved and published as International Standard. The introduction of STEP based software and its application in industry is thus on the verge of being broadly realized.In this initial release, STEP mainly addresses geometric and kinematic product model data properties which are sufficient 'static' model features for covering the area of conventional CAD design. However, the developing areas of advanced CAD design, simulation, and program-ming of dynamic systems are not yet covered by STEP. A static model description is not sufficient to cover such model features, and this implies for instance, that STEP must be extended to cope with descriptions of functional behavior of products.In the robotics area, Computer Aided Robotics (CAR) systems for design, off-line programming, and simulation are currently increasing their model features with new topics, such as multi-body dynamics, realistic motion planning and control. From dealing with pure geometric motions of mechanisms described by shape and kinematics, these computer based systems can now handle more complete system models in order to obtain more reliable designs, and provide simulation results for more feasible robot off-line programming.