This research effort will investigate the feasibility of identifying and documenting craft machining skills involved in machine tool planning, set-up, and monitoring for use in further automating the link between part design and machining. The work will be concerned with categorizing machinist's actions into three classes: planning, physical hand/eye manipulation skills, and monitoring and diagnosis. In the planning class typical decisions of a machinists during a simple set-up operation will be ordered into a decision path. During this exploratory work, strong emphasis will be on representing the set-up skills rather than any encoding in computer software. An attempt will be made to describe some of the hand/eye manipulation tasks, such as used to properly seat a work part in a holding fixture.
