An Interactive System for Modeling and Monitoring a Manipulation Environment

The development of high-level manipulation languages will cause an explosion in the number of declarations about the real world environment. Procedures may be written in a few higher level statements, while world descriptions will still require hundreds. Without these descriptions, manipulation procedures can not be executed. Since the world model is a complex data base describing three-dimensional objects, it is not easy to construct. A system is proposed which enables the user to construct models of objects interactively. The system provides a laser pointer as a nieasuring tool and a display monitor for visualizing the internal data base and the real world.