Using Java for real-time critical industrial robot programming

Abstract

I. VISION Industrial robotics is characterized by sophisticated mechanical components and control algorithms.However, the efficient use of robotic systems is very much limited by existing programming methods which make software development complex and time-consuming.In order to overcome these shortcomings, the vision of the research project Soft-Robot was to facilitate robotics software development, i.e. increase reuse and reduce development time, by providing "robotics" as just another API in Java which is currently the most popular programming language with billions of supported devices, millions of skilled software developers and a broad range of available libraries and tools.Hence, robotics software can be easily combined with those libraries and can be programmed using integrated development environments (e.g.Eclipse) with their rich built-in support for build management, revision control, or unit tests.In comparison to C/C++, Java is more comfortable to use and less error-prone due to its automatic memory management.