A Static Analyzer for Industrial Robotic Applications

In this paper, we describe a static analysis approach to detect potential runtime errors for a programming language that is used to program industrial robots. The language we deal in this paper is RAPID, a high level programming language for programming ABB industrial robots. The presence of real-time interrupts, exception handlers and complex data-types makes it a difficult language for general purpose static analyzers. The properties of interest include some generic programming errors as well as some domain-specific properties that the robot system must comply with. Generic programming errors include properties like integer overflow, array access out of bounds and division by zero. An example of a domain-specific property is defining boundary limits for robotic arm movement. We have developed a tool to detect these errors successfully in the presence of real-time interrupts.