The future of robot programming

Abstract

SUMMARYThis paper presents current trends in robot programming. The open problems with current robot programming systems are outlined and indications for solutions are given. Since computer controlled robots have been introduced, the methodology of robot programming has seen a great deal of development. Two completely different approaches to robot programming have been considered in the past. On the one hand within the Artificial Intelligence community a lot of research has been done to provide robots with autonomous reasoning capabilities. On the other hand, the need to control industrial robots has pushed the development of simple but effective methods for robot programming. To put it simply, Artificial Intelligence researchers have taken a top-down approach trying to solve the difficult problem of reasoning and have assumed that all the rest was easy. Others have taken a bottom-up approach first trying to control robots and only later trying to incorporate intelligence. The complexity of industrial automation tasks requires programming systems more sophisticated that those in use today. Artificial Intelligence is the best candidate to create the next generation of robot programming systems.