Robotic tasks are becoming increasingly complex, and with this also the robotic systems. This requires new tools to manage this complexity and to orchestrate the systems to fulfill demanding autonomous tasks. For this purpose, we developed a new graphical tool targeting at the creation and execution of robotic tasks, called RAFCON. These tasks are described in hierarchical state machines supporting concurrency. A formal notation of this concept is given. The tool provides many debugging mechanisms and a GUI with a graphical editor, allowing for intuitive visual programming and fast prototyping. The application of RAFCON for an autonomous mobile robot in the SpaceBotCamp competition has already proved to be successful.
Maintaining competitiveness and mitigating health issues test test caused by unergonomic working conditions are two main reasons for automating production processes. But such automation is expensive, also because test test experts are required to program the robots. One approach to lowering these costs is to enable shop-floor workers to program robots by providing task-level programming tools. Task-level programming is an established approach, yet appropriate workflows for experts and shop-floor workers remain to be defined. The objective of this paper is to evaluate RAZER, a framework for robot tasklevel programming, in which skill programming and parameter interface definitions are integrated. The framework provides workflows for both experts -creating skills and providing their parameter interfaces -and for shop-floor workers -using these skills to create executable robot tasks in an intuitive human-robot interface (HRI). The HRI is a graphical user interface that runs in a browser, and provides access to other man-machine-interfaces, such as Programming by Demonstration. Two pilot and two user studies proof that RAZER fulfills the demands of both experts and novice users.
There is an ongoing shift in industries from mass production to low-batch-production with highly individualized goods. This increases the programming effort required for the producing machines and robots, which is currently carried out by robot experts. For keeping the production economical, new programming approaches are required, allowing shop-floor workers to instruct robots. One approach is to develop robotic skills, which are pre-programmed software modules that only need to be parametrized by the shop-floor user. In this paper, a new software architecture for robot skills is presented, which aims at robustness and human-robot interaction. In addition, four basic demands on the skill parametrization are described that fasten up the process and increase intuitiveness for the user. We give several examples and implement a screwing skill and a pick & place skill, which are demonstrated in two case studies.
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