A novel Skill-based Programming Paradigm based on Autonomous Playing and Skill-centric Testing
This work addresses the challenge of robot programming accessibility for inexperienced users, representing an incremental improvement by integrating existing methods into a novel framework.
The paper tackles the problem of making robot programming more accessible to inexperienced users by introducing a skill-based paradigm that combines autonomous skill acquisition through robotic playing with visual programming and kinesthetic teaching, resulting in a framework that reduces programming barriers and enables continuous skill testing.
We introduce a novel paradigm for robot pro- gramming with which we aim to make robot programming more accessible for unexperienced users. In order to do so we incorporate two major components in one single framework: autonomous skill acquisition by robotic playing and visual programming. Simple robot program skeletons solving a task for one specific situation, so-called basic behaviours, are provided by the user. The robot then learns how to solve the same task in many different situations by autonomous playing which reduces the barrier for unexperienced robot programmers. Programmers can use a mix of visual programming and kinesthetic teaching in order to provide these simple program skeletons. The robot program can be implemented interactively by programming parts with visual programming and kinesthetic teaching. We further integrate work on experience-based skill-centric robot software testing which enables the user to continuously test implemented skills without having to deal with the details of specific components.