Robotics and the World/Programming Concepts

2. Programming Concepts

The development of robot programming concepts is almost as old as the development of robot manipulators itself. As the ultimate goal of industrial robotics has been the development of sophisticated production machines with the hope to reduce costs in manufacturing areas like material handling, welding, spray-painting and assembly, tremendous efforts have been undertaken by the international robotics community to design user-friendly and at the same time powerful methods. The evolution reaches from early control concepts on the hardware level via point-to-point and simple motion level languages to motion-oriented structured robot programming languages. The robot programming languages can be classified according to the robot reference model, the type of control structure used for data, type of motion specification, the sensors, the interfaces to external machines, and the peripherals used. The following types of programming languages are available.

Point to point motion language, Basic motion languages at assembler level, Non-structured high level programming languages, Structured high level programming languages, NC type languages, Object oriented languages, Task oriented languages.