Using abstraction mechanisms to solve complex tasks programming in robotics

This paper aims at describing how the abstraction mechanisms developed around strong typed languages like ADA could be applied successfully to the programming of complex tasks in robotics. Once we defined the abstraction and thinking mechanisms it involves, we try to apply them to a concrete example which is the programming of an application in which a 6 degrees of freedom industrial robot has to cooperate with a 2 degrees of freedom positioning table to perform an insertion task. In this example, we are not concerned with the algorithms but with the multi-tasks implementation of the solution and the relations between the tasks. Finally, we will propose some routines written in ADA to show how it is easy to translate the abstract definition of a problem into a program ready to run.