Task level robot programming: Background, methods and current state

Abstract

The thesis is a literature review on task level robot programming. It has been researched from various point of views, starting from the history of robot programming in general to find the underlying motivations for more intuitive and abstract robot programming, which is followed by the methods and general structure of a task level programming environment. A survey on the state of the art is also presented in this paper, where currently available commercial robot programming systems and studies in literature are reviewed. Task level robot programming makes robot programming more intuitive, faster and requires no programming expertise if done correctly. Small to medium sized enterprises with small batch sizes, frequently changing products and possibly underqualified staff with regard to programming skills would benefit most from intuitive human-robot interfaces by being enabled to access the production efficiency of robotics without programming expertise. Currently there are few commercial process specific robot programming systems, where robot programming is automatic and the user inputs only a task specification. Addition to the commercial systems, task level programming and intuitive human-machine interfaces such as multimodal-interaction or teaching by demonstration are emerging research topics.