On reverse-engineering the KUKA Robot Language

TL;DR

This paper explores methods to reverse-engineer the KUKA Robot Language by implementing lightweight interpreters on top of a flexible Robotics API, addressing challenges in language mapping and execution.

Contribution

It introduces two approaches—tree-based and bytecode-based—for interpreting KRL programs within a generalized robotics API framework.

Findings

Successfully implemented tree-based interpreter for KRL

Developed bytecode-based interpreter for KRL

Demonstrated extensibility and flexibility of the approach

Abstract

Most commercial manufacturers of industrial robots require their robots to be programmed in a proprietary language tailored to the domain - a typical domain-specific language (DSL). However, these languages oftentimes suffer from shortcomings such as controller-specific design, limited expressiveness and a lack of extensibility. For that reason, we developed the extensible Robotics API for programming industrial robots on top of a general-purpose language. Although being a very flexible approach to programming industrial robots, a fully-fledged language can be too complex for simple tasks. Additionally, legacy support for code written in the original DSL has to be maintained. For these reasons, we present a lightweight implementation of a typical robotic DSL, the KUKA Robot Language (KRL), on top of our Robotics API. This work deals with the challenges in reverse-engineering the language and mapping its specifics to the Robotics API. We introduce two different approaches of interpreting and executing KRL programs: tree-based and bytecode-based interpretation.