What to read after PasRo?

The origin ofPASRO (Trademark ofBIOMATIK GmbH, Freiburg, FRG) was a set of pro cedures for performing arithmetic on geometric data types and for coordinate transforma tion for study and teaching purposes, developed as a base for high level robot programming. The study of many robot languages revealed areas for necessary improvements: 1. Move statements must be independent of a specific robot control system. They must instead be based on the different types of trajectory calculation resp. interpolation. 2. A structured language concept should be employed, including a structured concept for concurrent programming (The latter is not yet implemented in PASRO owing to the use of Standard PASCAL instead of CONCURRENT PASCAL or MODULA 2). 3. Integration of geometric data types into existing structured data types. 4. Simplicity of language constructs. 5. Integration of teach-in via frame-files. This resulted in the implementation ofPASRO by Christian Blume (BLUME [1.1]) and in the joint development of the SRL concept (Structured Robot Language) as it was intro duced in May 1983 at Liege (see BLUMEIJAKOB [1.2]). PASRO is at present state of the implementation a programming system for teaching, studying and experimenting and not for industrial use, although it could easily be extended for that purpose (cf paragraph 8.2). We especially thank the PSI company, Berlin, who gave us technical support to write this book, the BIOMATIK company ofFreiburg, which is marketing PASRO, its manager G. R. Koch, and the University of Karlsruhe, Prof. Dr.-Ing. U. Rembold.