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The purpose of this paper is to report a collection of developments that enable users to program industrial robots using speech, several device interfaces, force control and code generation techniques.

The reported system is explained in detail and a few practical examples are given that demonstrate its usefulness for small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), where robots and humans need to cooperate to achieve a common goal (coworker scenario). The paper also explores the user interface software adapted for use by non‐experts.

The programming‐by‐demonstration (PbD) system presented proved to be very efficient with the task of programming entirely new features to an industrial robotic system. The system uses a speech interface for user command, and a force‐controlled guiding system for teaching the robot the details about the task being programmed. With only a small set of implemented robot instructions it was fairly easy to teach the robot system a new task, generate the robot code and execute it immediately.

Although a particular robot controller was used, the system is in many aspects general, since the options adopted are mainly based on standards. It can obviously be implemented with other robot controllers without significant changes. In fact, most of the features were ported to run with Motoman robots with success.

It is important to stress that the robot program built in this section was obtained without writing a single line of code, but instead just by moving the robot to the desired positions and adding the required robot instructions using speech. Even the upload task of the obtained module to the robot controller is commanded by speech, along with its execution/termination. Consequently, teaching the robotic system a new feature is accessible for any type of user with only minor training.

This type of PbD systems will constitute a major advantage for SMEs, since most of those companies do not have the necessary engineering resources to make changes or add new functionalities to their robotic manufacturing systems. Even at the system integrator level these systems are very useful for avoiding the need for specific knowledge about all the controllers with which they work: complexity is hidden beyond the speech interfaces and portable interface devices, with specific and user‐friendly APIs making the connection between the programmer and the system.

Using Internet‐enabled mobile handheld devices to access the World Wide Web is a promising addition to the Web and traditional e‐commerce. Mobile handheld devices provide convenience and portable access to the huge information on the Internet for mobile users from anywhere and at anytime. However, mobile commerce has not enjoyed the same level of success as the e‐commerce has so far because mobile Web contents are scarce and mostly awkward for browsing. The major reason of the problems is most software engineers are not familiar with handheld devices, let alone programming for them. To help software engineers better understand this subject, this article gives a comprehensive study of handheld computing and programming for mobile commerce. It includes five major topics: (i) mobile commerce systems, (ii) mobile handheld devices, (iii) handheld computing, (iv) server‐side handheld computing and programming, and (v) client‐side handheld computing and programming. The most popular server‐side handheld applications are mostly functioning through mobile Web contents, which are constructed by using only few technologies and languages. On the other hand, various environments/languages are available for client‐side handheld computing and programming. Five of the most popular are (i) BREW, (ii) J2ME, (iii) Palm OS, (iv) Symbian OS, and (v) Windows Mobile. They are using either C/C++ or Java programming languages. This article will explain J2ME, a micro version of Java, and Palm OS programming, using C, by giving step‐by‐step procedures of J2ME and Palm application development.

Motif User Interface Application (MUIApp) is an object‐oriented graphical user‐interface application framework. It simplifies the task of writing, modifying, and debugging window‐based applications by application of object‐oriented programming to the construction and manipulation of graphical user interface (GUI) components using a well‐established window system. The key means adopted in the design include: encapsulation of tedious X‐window programming details, construction of high‐level GUI components using Motif and Xt widgets as the primary building blocks, and definition of collaboration mechanisms between GUI components. Reports that the abstractions and mechanisms provided by MUIApp facilitate the development of graphical user interfaces for applications. Simplicity, extensibility and reusability are the key concerns in the design. MUIApp is written in C++ and runs mainly on top of Motif.

Interaction with robot systems for the specification of manufacturing tasks needs to be simple since the paper targets the widespread use of robots in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In the best case, existing practices from manual work could be used, to ensure current employees a smooth introduction to robot technology as a natural part of their work. The aim of the paper is to simplify the robot‐programming task by allowing the user to simply make technical drawings on a sheet of paper. Craftsmen use paper and raw sketches for several situations: to share ideas, to get a better perspective of the problem, or to remember the customer situation. Currently these sketches have to be either interpreted by the worker when producing the final product by hand, or transferred into CAD files using an appropriate software tool. The former means that no automation is included, the latter means extra work and considerable experience in using the CAD tool.

The approach is to use a digital pen and paper, both based on the Anoto technology, as input devices for SME robotic tasks, thereby creating simpler and more user‐friendly alternatives for the programming, parameterization and commanding actions. To this end, the basic technology has been investigated and fully working prototypes have been developed to explore the possibilities in the context of typical SME applications. Based on the encouraging experimental results, it is believed that drawings on digital paper will, among other means of human‐robot interaction, play an important role in manufacturing SMEs in the future. Consequently, a fully working test‐case welding example is presented and explained, allowing a complete demonstration of all the developed features.

This paper explores the utilization of digital pens for the task of programming industrial robot manipulators, i.e. the possibility of obtaining robot programs from technical drawings on a sheet of paper. A practical implementation was presented to demonstrate how to use digital pens and CAD applications to program industrial robots. The results clearly show that the digital pen based on Anoto technology, integrated with CAD interfaces and code generation interfaces, is very useful and powerful for the planned task. The next steps will be to adopt a software infrastructure and develop the necessary services to allow system integrators to consider this type of device as an advanced user‐friendly robot‐programming method.

This is the first time that digital pens have been used to program robot manipulators.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

A tailored graphical user interface (GUI) for finite element analysis, fully integrated into Microsoft Windows 3.1, has been developed. The current application is the simulation of flat sheet extrusion of thermoplastics, but many of the features would be common to a wide range of finite element analyses. Microsoft’s C/C++ Professional Development System 7.0, including the Software Development Kit 3.1 (SDK), has been used as the programming tool for the GUI. The interface is based on the Common User Access Advanced Interface Design Guide, which is part of the IBM Systems Application Architecture Library, and The Windows Interface: An Application Design Guide, which is part of the SDK. A memory handling technique is proposed to break the imposed 64 KB data segmentation. Connected finite element calculation routines are written in Fortran and compiled by the Salford FTN77/x86 32‐bit compiler. The protected mode interface of the Fortran compiler allows direct access by the GUI, and allows the computation to run as a 32‐bit background application, without memory limitations, in the multitasking environment. Finite element routines are supported by pre‐ and post‐processors comprising mesh generation, post‐processing for derived results, and graphical displays. A convenient contouring algorithm is proposed to generate contoured plots of nodal quantities in the form of iso‐lines or iso‐fields.

The purpose of this paper is to present a CAD‐based human‐robot interface that allows non‐expert users to teach a robot in a manner similar to that used by human beings to teach each other.

Intuitive robot programming is achieved by using CAD drawings to generate robot programs off‐line. Sensory feedback allows minimization of the effects of uncertainty, providing information to adjust the robot paths during robot operation.

It was found that it is possible to generate a robot program from a common CAD drawing and run it without any major concerns about calibration or CAD model accuracy.

A limitation of the proposed system has to do with the fact that it was designed to be used for particular technological applications.

Since most manufacturing companies have CAD packages in their facilities today, CAD‐based robot programming may be a good option to program robots without the need for skilled robot programmers.

The paper proposes a new CAD‐based robot programming system. Robot programs are directly generated from a CAD drawing “running” on a commonly available 3D CAD package (Autodesk Inventor) and not from a commercial, computer aided robotics (CAR) software, making it a simple CAD integrated solution. This is a low‐cost and low‐setup time system where no advanced robot programming skills are required to operate it. In summary, robot programs are generated with a high‐level of abstraction from the robot language.

Real-time implementation of sophisticated algorithms on robotic systems demands a rewarding interface between hardware and software components. Individual robot manufacturers have dedicated controllers and languages. However, robot operation would require either the knowledge of additional software or expensive add-on installations for effective communication between the robot controller and the computation software. This paper aims to present a novel method of interfacing the commercial robot controllers with most widely used simulation platform, e.g. MATLAB in real-time with a demonstration of visual predictive controller.

A remote personal computer (PC), running MATLAB, is connected with the IRC5 controller of an ABB robotic arm through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP server on the IRC5 responds to a request from an FTP client (MATLAB) on a remote computer. MATLAB provides the basic platform for programming and control algorithm development. The controlled output is transferred to the robot controller through Ethernet port as files and, thereby, the proposed scheme ensures connection and control of the robot using the control algorithms developed by the researchers without the additional cost of buying add-on packages or mastering vendor-specific programming languages.

New control strategies and contrivances can be developed with numerous conditions and constraints in simulation platforms. When the results are to be implemented in real-time systems, the proposed method helps to establish a simple, fast and cost-effective communication with commercial robot controllers for validating the real-time performance of the developed control algorithm.

The proposed method is used for real-time implementation of visual servo control with predictive controller, for accurate pick-and-place application with different initial conditions. The same strategy has been proven effective in supervisory control using two cameras and artificial neural network-based visual control of robotic manipulators.

This paper elaborates a real-time example using visual servoing for researchers working with industrial robots, enabling them to understand and explore the possibilities of robot communication.

The development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment is a complex task because of the lack of platform standards in cloud computing and mobile computing. The source code involves various proprietary programming libraries for different platforms. However, functionalities are inevitably changed over time, as well as the platform. Therefore, a great deal of development effort is required, when changes need to be made at functional and platform level. This paper aims to propose SIMON, a framework that eases complexity of the development to support software evolution.

SIMON shields the developer from the complexity of mobile and cloud platforms in the development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment. The framework uses model of application design to automate the development and support execution of mobile applications in system environment that needs integration to the number of data sources located on multiple clouds. The framework is composed of prefabricated components that support function changeability and platform adaptability.

The framework is examined with the development of a sample application. After it is evaluated with scenarios that involve changing at functional and platform levels, the result shows significant reducing of the development effort by comparing with the other approaches.

The framework facilitates the implementation of mobile applications in the software system that involves integration to multiple clouds, and it supports software evolution with lesser development effort.

This paper aims to discuss the experiment in creating featured collection web sites from specialized data in the Voyager integrated library system (ILS). The specialized interfaces for different collections aim to offer flexible collection‐driven web presentations for easier resource discovery and increased user attention.

The Faculty Research Showcase and Women's Studies Video Resources web sites at Wichita State University (WSU) Libraries are discussed. The paper addresses the model used to create the web sites: selecting data from Oracle database, presenting SQL query results, and creating the web sites using ASP, XHTML and CSS for browsing and search. The alternative approach of using XML, XPath and ASP.NET is also discussed. Some features of the public web sites such as linking each record back to the online public access catalog (OPAC) and adding both really simple syndication (RSS) feeds and cover images using both syndetic and locally‐created graphics are addressed.

Specialized Voyager data presentation is an example of the disintegration of library data and services. The new interfaces are user‐centered and provide visually‐appealing supplemental presentations to the traditional OPAC.

Web sites can be seamlessly integrated into public programming events and library instruction sessions to introduce local authors, featured collections, and resources in a specific area. The project model can be applied to different sets of data by slightly modifying the query, the programming, and the webpage appearance. Other possible local applications include leisure reading books, new book lists, movie collections, and local art museum collections. This approach can be applied by other libraries to highlight collections.

The paper takes a fresh look at the traditional OPAC and library datasets and illustrates new ways to present the bibliographic data in a library database.