The EC-funded AMADEUS Project is currently undertaking its second phase. Since the first phase, started in 1993, the need of devising and developing a reliable, user friendly Human Computer Interface (HCI) has been pressing. This system had to be able to ease the manipulation of the robotics: devices and their control systems, and allow the final user easy and friendly operation tasks on actual devices. Since the beginning, the whole HCI was thought as endowed with particular properties: understand a human request, expressed via different input devices; transmit human requests to the hardware control modules; receive feed back data from the control modules and present them to the human operator in a reliable and efficient way. In order to achieve these goals, some features of the system were listed: the use of a fully modular architecture, the correct definition of data structures, the correct definition of tasks, the use of easy to use, low cost, ergonomic devices. The Phase I Interface has been developed on an HP725 CRX24Z computer, in the UNIX environment, using the C language and the StarBase(R) Graphics Library. A brief description of that system will be given in this paper, with a particular emphasis on the devised general purpose architecture. Experience coming from the Phase I system has led to the present system, belonging to Phase IL In particular, the concepts underlining the overall system architecture have been exploited, being such architecture valuable fur its features of modularity, simplicity, reusability and general-purposeness. Several things have changed, though. As an implementation platform, a Personal Computer has been chosen. This is due to the peculiarities of PCs: they are small, low-cost and world-wide spread machines, and applications running on them are portable on a Hide class of machines, as well as usable by people with different professional backgrounds. The MS-Windows environment has been chosen, and the first version of the interface was developed on a Pentium 133 machine: fur what concerns the graphics library, the Direct(R) system has been used, due to its efficiency, speed, reliability and diffusion. The C++ language is the development tool. The ergonomic properties of the whole system are granted by the use of simple, intuitive, effective, flexible and multiple devices, which may be configured in order to best fit the needs and preferences of each user. Such devices are presently used through a specific data-acquisition board, in order to grant suitable performances: an entirely new data acquisition console has been devised and built. The overall HCI system, its evolution through different phases and possible applications and ideas about future developments, will be discussed.
