Using a CORBA synchronous scheduling service in Pick&Place operations

Industrial devices are increasingly adopting RTOSs or improved versions of general purpose OSs. This fact introduces new possibilities like wrapping the devices with open middleware technologies like CORBA. Thus, by using object oriented interfaces that should be provided by the vendors of the devices, heterogeneous industrial devices could be integrated in distributed applications. However, CORBA-like architectures may result relatively complex for automation engineers. The use of tools that substitute coding tasks for configuration tasks could be beneficial for them. This paper presents an interface for a generic anthropomorphic robotic arm which is being implemented for a particular case and how this interface could be used by an external synchronization service that has been presented in previous works.