A Model-Driven Approach to Support Engineering Changes in Industrial Robotics Software

Software development has improved greatly over the past decades with the introduction of new programming languages and tools. However, software development in the context of industrial robotics is dominated by practices that require attention to low-level accidental complexities related to the solution space of a particular domain. Most vendor-specific robotics platforms force the developer to be concerned with many low-level implementation details, which presents a maintenance challenge in the context of making engineering changes to the robotics solution. Additionally, satisfying the timing requirements across the platforms of multiple robot vendors represents an additional challenge. We introduce our work using Domain-Specific Modeling to support the control of industrial robots using models that are at a higher level of abstraction than traditional robot programming languages. Our modeling approach assists robotics developers to plan the schedule, validate timing requirements, optimize robot control, handle engineering changes, and support multiple platforms.