A Graph-Based Visual Tool for Workstations

A software tool has been designed and developed for workstation applications. It is a library of functions based on a graph formalism, and consists of graph manipulation functions and visualization functions. It provides for a standard graph editor and performs animation of changing graph data. We describe the characteristics of this tool and illustrate an extended Petri net simulator and a prototype robot system as its applications. In the prototype robot system, the graph editor is used for robot data input and the formalized graph data structure is used for data manipulation, for example in 3D set operations.