Robot software and Best Programming Language for Robotics

Robot software is used to perform autonomous tasks, It is the set of coded commands or instructions that tell the mechanical device and the electronic system, known together as a robot, what tasks to perform, Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.

Industrial robot software

Robot software can develop intelligent mechanical devices, The most common tasks include feedback loops, control, path-finding, data filtering, locating, and sharing the data, Although the software is about manipulation of the data and seeing the result on screen, The robot software is for the manipulation of the objects or the tools in the real world.

Industrial robot software consists of the data objects and the lists of instructions, known as the program flow (list of instructions), The data & program reside in separate sections of the robot controller memory, You can change the data without changing the program & vice versa, The robot software can create the robotic applications that help or entertain the people, The applications contain command-and-control and tasking software.

You can learn autonomous robot control theory, It helps you to build a simulator that allows you to practice control theory on a simple mobile robot, The robot can guess the state of the real world based on the measurements returned by its sensors, It can change the state of the real world through the application of its control signals, Every robot comes with different capabilities and control concerns.

So, one of the first steps in control design is to come up with an abstraction of the real world, known as a model, with which to interpret the sensor readings and make decisions, The robot may be an autonomous mobile robot, So, it will move around in space freely and it will be done under its control, This is in contrast to, an RC robot (which is not autonomous) or a factory robot arm (which is not mobile).

There are many different ways the robot may be equipped to monitor its environment, These can contain anything from proximity sensors, light sensors, bumpers, cameras, and so forth, Robots may communicate with the external sensors that give it the information the robot itself cannot directly observe.

Best Programming Language for Robotics

We are investing a lot of time and effort in learning new programming languages, If you are a new roboticist, you want to learn the programming languages that are going to be useful for your career, many programming languages are used in the world to program micro-controllers, They are far too many to learn, Each language has different advantages for robotics.

Roboticists should develop a Programming Mindset rather than be proficient in one specific language, it doesn’t matter which programming language you learn first, Each language develops your proficiency with the programming mindset & makes it easier to learn any new language, Programming your robot is the final step involved in building the robot, When you have chosen the actuators, the electronics, the sensors and more.

C/C++

C/C++ is one of the most popular languages, C presents high-level functionality while keeping good low-level control, Java is more modern than C and it presents many safety features to the detriment of low-level control.

Many people agree that C and C++ are good starting points for new roboticists Because a lot of the hardware libraries use these languages, They allow interaction with low-level hardware, allow for real-time performance and they are very mature programming languages, C/C++ is the Number 1 programming language in the robotics.

As the language has much more functionality, So, You’ll use C++ more than C, C++ is an extension of C, It can be useful to learn at least a little bit of C first, so, you can know it when you find the hardware library written in C, C/C++ are not as simple to use such as Python or MATLAB.

It can take a lot longer to implement the same functionality using C & it will require many more lines of code, Although, as robotics is very dependent on real-time performance, C and C++ are the closest things that roboticists have to be the standard language.

Python

The most important thing is to find the language that feels natural for you and fits with your robotic hardware, You want a language that enables you to develop the programs quickly and easily so that you can focus more on developing functionality, So, You have to learn Python first.

Python is a superb straightforward language to learn and hugely powerful thanks to the many, easily accessible libraries, You can produce usable code in Python as fast as you can type, After you have gotten reasonably proficient using Python language, You have to learn C, followed by C++, You will need it to interface with a huge majority of robotic hardware drivers.

Python (and C++) are the two main programming languages found in ROS, such as Java, There is a huge resurgence of Python in recent years especially in robotics, it is an interpretive language, and the prime focus of the language is ease of use, Unlike Java, Python dispenses with a lot of usual things which take up the time in programming, such as defining and casting variable types.

We can see a lot more Python in robotics, Python enables simple bindings with C/C++ code, The performance of heavy parts of the code can be implemented in these languages to avoid performance loss, and many electronics support Python out-of-the-box.

Java

Some computer science degrees teach Java to the students as their first programming language, Java hides the underlying memory functionality from the programmer, which makes it easier to program than, say, C, but this means that you have less of an understanding of what it is doing with your code.

When you come to robotics from a computer science background (and many people do, especially in research) you will probably have learned Java, Like C# & MATLAB, Java is an interpretive language, which means that it is not compiled into the machine code.

The Java Virtual Machine interprets the instructions at run-time, The theory for using Java is that you can use the same code on many different machines, thanks to the Java Virtual Machine, this doesn’t always work out and can cause the code to run slowly, Although, Java is quite popular in some parts of the robotics, so, you may need it.

C#/.NET

C# is a proprietary programming language offered by Microsoft, C#/.NET is included largely because of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which uses it as its primary language, If you are going to use this system, you’re going to have to use C#, However, learning C/C++ first might be a good option for long term development of your coding skills, .NET/C# is used to develop the applications in Visual Studio.

MATLAB

There is a very popular Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB, Some people have developed entire robotics systems using MATLAB alone If you want to analyze data, produce advanced graphs, or implement control systems, you will want to learn MATLAB, MATLAB and its open-source relatives such as Octave, is very popular with some robotic engineers for analyzing the data and developing the control systems.

Assembly

Assembly language is one step away from the machine code but it is very tedious to use, Assembly should only be used when you need absolute instruction-level control of your code, Assembly helps you program at the level of ones and zeros, This is a programming at the lowest level (more or less).

In the recent past, many low-level electronics required programming in Assembly, With the rise of Arduino and others such the microcontrollers, you can program easily at this level using C/C++, So, Assembly is going to become less necessary for most roboticists.

BASIC/Pascal

BASIC & Pascal are the basis for many industrial robot languages and they were two of the first programming languages, Basic is one of the first widely used programming languages, and it is still used by some micro-controllers (Basic Micro, BasicX, Parallax) for the educational robots.

BASIC was designed for beginners, It stands for Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which makes it a pretty simple language to start with, Pascal language introduces the constructs such as the pointers, that make it a good stepping stone from BASIC to a more involved language and it was designed to encourage good programming practices.

These days, both languages are a bit outdated to be good for everyday use, However, it can be useful to learn them if you are going to do a lot of low-level coding or you want to become familiar with the other industrial robot languages.

Nearly every robot manufacturer has developed their own proprietary robot programming language, which has been one of the problems in industrial robotics, You can become familiar with several of them by learning Pascal, Although, you are still going to have to learn a new language every time you start using a new robot.

LISP

LISP is not as widely used as many of the other programming languages, It is the world’s second oldest programming language (FORTRAN is older, but only by one year), It is still quite important within Artificial Intelligence programming, Parts of ROS are written in LISP, although you don’t need to know it to use ROS.

The programming options such as ROS Industrial have started to offer more standardized options for the programmers, Although, if you are a technician, you are more likely to have to use the manufacturer’s language.

Hardware Description Languages (HDLs)

Hardware Description Languages are used to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), So, They are quite familiar to some roboticists, FPGAs allow you to develop the electronic hardware without having to produce the silicon chip, which makes them a quicker and easier option for some developments, These languages are a programming way of describing the electronics.

You may never use HDLs If you don’t prototype the electronics, so, You should know that they exist, as they are different from the other programming languages, all the operations are carried out in parallel, rather than sequentially as with the processor-based languages.

Processing (Arduino) is a variant of C++ that contains some simplifications to make the programming  easier, Python is one of the most popular scripting languages, It is very simple to learn and it can be used to put the programs together very fast & efficiently.

Scripting languages

The scripting language is a high-level programming language that is used to control the software application, It is interpreted in real-time or translated on the fly, instead of being compiled in advance, The scripting language is a general-purpose programming language or it may be limited to specific functions used to augment running of the application or the system program.

The scripting language has the data objects residing in the registers and the program flow represents the list of instructions or the instruction set that is used to program the robot, The scripting language instruction set is a streamlined list of program commands that are used to simplify the programming process and offer rapid application development.

Programming languages in industrial robotics are designed to build data structures and algorithms from scratch while scripting languages are intended to connect or glue the instructions and components together.

Parallel languages

All robotic applications need parallelism and event-based programming, Parallelism is where the robot does two or more things at the same time, This requires appropriate hardware and software.

Many programming languages depend on the threads or complex abstraction classes to handle parallelism and the complexity that comes with it, like concurrent access to shared resources, URBI offers a higher level of abstraction by integrating parallelism and the events in the core of the language semantics.

Safety considerations

You can create manageable chunks of functional code, By creating the segments of code specific to each product, you gradually build up the library and develop the file system on your computer to easily look up the necessary code.

You have to document everything within the code using the comments, Documenting everything is necessary for all jobs, especially robotics, As you become more & more advanced, you may add the comments to general sections of code, though as you start, you should add the comment to (almost) every line.

You have to save different versions of the code and do not always overwrite the same file, if you find that your 200+ lines of code do not compile, you won’t be stuck going through it line by line, but you can revert to a previously saved (and functional) version and add/modify it as needed, Code does not take up much space on the hard drive, so, you should not feel pressured only to save few copies.

Programming errors give you many dangerous safety considerations in large industrial robots, The power and size of the industrial robots, So, they can inflict severe injury if they are programmed incorrectly or they are used in an unsafe manner.

It is unsafe for the human to remain in the work area of the robot during the automatic operation because of the mass and high speeds of industrial robots, The system can begin motion at unexpected times and a human will be unable to react quickly enough in many situations, even if prepared to do so.

So, if the software is free of programming errors, great care must be taken to make an industrial robot safe for human workers or human interaction, such as loading or unloading parts, clearing the part jam, or performing maintenance.

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