Trends in CAD/CAM systems for robotics

Nowadays, several general purpose CAD/CAM systems including robotics applications are commercially available. They require large computers facilities and sophisticated graphics workstations. Currently, trends is in dedicated systems which are implemented on micro or minicomputers and are devoted to specific applications. In this paper, such a dedicated interactive system is described with emphasis on the 3D data- base design specifications. Real-time and memory size constraints are keys requirements in the design. So far, this CAD/CAM software is intended for robot programming and CAD of workcells. A specific application involving synthetic vision generated by the system is also described.