<title>Model for skills-oriented robot programming (SKORP)</title>

Abstract

A robot skill is an ability of a robot to repeatably accomplish any useful action that can be described unambiguously to a production engineer in English, and can be described formally to a systems programmer using a skill template. A robot operation is created on-line by parameterizing and connecting robot skills. The on-line interface is iconic, with each icon representing a single skill or a complex icon that represents an abstraction of two or more skill icons. The objective of modeling robot operations as a sequence of skills is to reduce the cost of programming robot systems. This is achieved by separating the programming responsibilities of the application specialist and the systems programmer. The application specialist who works on the shop floor is able to create robot programs without being concerned with the low level programming to control sensors and devices. A computational paradigm for creating and maintaining the robot skills is presented. This is the underlying software architecture which enables the creation of a shop floor interface. It is an object-based paradigm designed for the abstraction of the low level functions of the sensors and machine controllers. The skills are defined as template objects with a list of attributes to completely specify a sensor-based robot action. The other objects include sensor drivers, virtual sensors, and machine drivers.