Programming of a Lightweight Robot Using Function Blocks and Sequential Function Charts

This paper presents an approach to realize a universal robot programming language. Currently, numerous programming languages for industrial robots exit, depending on the manufacturer of the robot. Attempts to create a standardized language have failed in the past. The presence of several new providers of robots on the market increases the number of different programming languages and concepts. For this reason, it would be desirable to have a unified procedure as can be found in the field of programmable logic controllers. Here, a specification is valid, which defines certain types of programming languages. In this contribution, a lightweight robot was connected to a programmable logic controller, where the programming of the robot should be performed. For this purpose, the communication between these two partner devices was achieved using precast data structures. Concerning the programmable logic controller, function blocks were developed to operate the robot and its periphery. They include robot-based functionality, known from common robot programming languages. With regard to the robot, a client program, which interprets and executes the commands from the programmable logic controller, was implemented. Some small robot tasks were performed to show the simplicity of our approach to robot programming based on the languages of programmable logic controllers.