Towards A Domain-specific Language For Pick-And-Place Applications
This work addresses the problem of making robot programming more accessible for non-expert users in industrial or automation settings, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing domain-specific language and software product line concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of programming robots for pick-and-place applications by proposing a domain-specific language to reduce complexity and effort for domain experts without robotics backgrounds, and it implements a configurable code generator that produces C++ code for real robots or simulators.
Programming robots is a complicated and time-consuming task. A robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system. Often, control and communication paths within the system are tightly coupled to the actual physical configuration of the robot. Thus, programming a robot is a very challenging task for domain experts who do not have a dedicated background in robotics. In this paper we present an approach towards a domain specific language, which is intended to reduce the efforts and the complexity which is required when developing robotic applications. Furthermore we apply a software product line approach to realize a configurable code generator which produces C++ code which can either be run on real robots or on a robot simulator.