Object-oriented Software for Industrial Robots

Industrial robots are very flexible machines that can perform operations with high speed and sub-millimeter accuracy. However, those robots are bound to proprietary programming languages, which often leads to limited reusability of applications and causes high effort for coordinating teams of robots or integrating the robots with other systems. On the other hand, the area of software engineering has experienced significant progress in the last decades. Besides structured development processes and modeling paradigms, large ecosystems of programming languages, frameworks and all kinds of libraries have been created by communities of developers. The main contribution of this thesis is the design of an object-oriented framework for industrial robotics applications. This design is language independent, allowing it to be realized based on any modern software platform and programming language. The main challenge in the context of industrial robotics is the need for deterministic execution of operations that control hardware devices, and to guarantee that tight timing bounds are held during execution. The presented design meets these requirements without compromising flexibility and expressiveness. The software design is applied to several concrete hardware devices and evaluated based on three application examples. The thesis demonstrates that the design is able to fulfill a large set of requirements of current and future industrial robotics applications and thus presents a significant contribution to software engineering for industrial robotics