Design Protocol, Part Design Editor, and Geometry Library of the Vertical Workstation of the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility at the National Bureau of Standards

摘要

In the Vertical Workstation (VWS) of the NBS Automated Manufacturing Research Facility, metal parts are machined automatically from a feature-based design. A simple two-and-a-half dimensional part may be designed and machined within an hour, allowing half the time for design input. Workstation activity may be divided into design, process planning, data execution, and physical execution stages. The design of a part is expressed as a list of features on a block-shaped workpiece. Each feature is a removed volume. A feature is expressed by giving the name of the feature type and values for several parameters appropriate to that feature type. The design editor is an interactive system that runs on a Sun computer which is used to create or change designs. The system engages the user in a dialog to determine what the user wants to do, and prepares a design according to the user's instructions. The editor draws a three-view picture of the part being edited. The geometry library is a set of LISP functions that do geometric calculations to support the operation of the design editor and other modules of the VWS software.