This paper discusses the importance and realizability of the "high-level programmability" concept for wheeled mobile robots. A new high-level mobile robot language, called motion description language (MDL), is proposed. This language has a strong and stable theoretical foundation. The Java-based object-oriented MDL implements the structured robot geometry into its class hierarchy perfectly. The language MDL is not only "a" mobile robot language, but is a strong candidate for "the standard" mobile robot language. This innovation will thrust the mobile robotics field forward to meet the challenges of the new century head on.

Database technology has been successfully applied to the traditional data processing environment where data are represented by well-formatted records. There is a growing interest in extending this database technology to more advanced application environments such as VLSI CAD/CAM, cartography, etc., where data are less structured and have very complex semantics. In this paper, we describe the data interactions in the design and manufacturing phases which are necessary to integrate the two phases automatically. These data requirements are part of an integrated information support system geared towards the “make to order” design and manufacturing process. An expert system translator to carry out the integration is described and demonstrated in an example. An overall goal of our research is to determine the database support necessary for a completely integrated information support system for generic design and manufacturing processes.

A file maintenance model, called the multiple random access storage units model, is introduced. Storage units can be accessed simultaneously, and the parallel processing of an associative query is achieved by distributing data evenly among the storage units. Maximum parallelism is obtained when data satisfying an associative query are evenly distributed for every possible query. An allocation scheme called M -cycle allocation is proposed to maintain large files of data on multiple random access storage units. The allocation scheme provides an efficient and straightforward indexing over multidimensional key spaces and supports the parallel processing of orthogonal range queries. Our analysis shows that M -cycle allocation achieves the near-optimum parallelism for processing the orthogonal range queries. Moreover, there is no duplication of records and no increase in insertion/deletion cost.