A New Skill Based Robot Programming Language Using UML/P Statecharts

TL;DR

This paper presents LightRocks, a domain-specific robot programming language with multi-level abstraction, utilizing UML/P Statecharts and code generation to simplify robot programming for experts and technicians.

Contribution

Introduction of LightRocks, a novel multi-level DSL for robot programming using UML/P Statecharts and MontiCore, enabling flexible, abstracted, and code-generated robot control.

Findings

Supports three abstraction levels for robot programming

Enables code generation with controller abstraction

Provides a graphical Eclipse plugin for development

Abstract

This paper introduces the new robot programming language LightRocks (Light Weight Robot Coding for Skills), a domain specific language (DSL) for robot programming. The language offers three different level of abstraction for robot programming. On lowest level skills are coded by domain experts. On a more abstract level these skills are supposed to be combined by shop floor workers or technicians to define tasks. The language is designed to allow as much flexibility as necessary on the lowest level of abstraction and is kept as simple as possible with the more abstract layers. A Statechart like model is used to describe the different levels of detail. For this we apply the UML/P and the language workbench MontiCore. To this end we are able to generate code while hiding controller specific implementation details. In addition the development in LightRocks is supported by a generic graphical editor implemented as an Eclipse plugin.