Industrial Robotics Programming Language

[Penny Bozic]

Whilethere are hundreds of programming languages that exist, only a few are widely used in robotics today. The most popular programming languages, like C++ and Python, have cornered the market in terms of function and ease of use. Meanwhile older, more outdated languages, like Pascal, continue to serve as the backbone for more tailored, proprietary languages and robotic operating systems used by leading industrial robot companies.

As the market for robots continues to grow for use in manufacturing and other industries like healthcare and service sectors, demand for highly skilled developers and engineers steeped in C, C++ and Python will continue to increase as well.

While engineers working on other types of robots rely on a combination of popular programming languages to make their robots fully functional, most top industrial robot companies like ABB, Comau and Fanuc have developed their own proprietary robotic programming languages their engineers learn on the job. At the heart of many of these proprietary programming languages is Pascal, making it a popular programming language for would-be engineers to learn to familiarize themselves with some of the future languages they may have to work with. Pascal not only teaches developers best practices in robotic programming, it teaches the basic functionality and technical details behind many of the leading industrial robots.

No matter the robotic programming language one chooses to master first, the knowledge gained will be helpful in other future robotic endeavors. Here are a few more robotic programming languages every budding programming and developer wanting to work with robots should know.

For developers wanting to analyze data and run simulations, and develop and implement robotic control systems with specially-designed interfaces, MATLAB is a great tool. When paired with the Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB, which includes functions for kinematics, dynamics and trajectory generation, developers can create systems for robotic arm research and simulations.

Circuits are a critical component in robotics and where hardware description languages play a key role in robotic programming. HDLs, like Verilog and VHSIC Hardware Description Language (or VHDL), make programming circuits easier by allowing developers to describe circuits using words and symbols. One important thing to note: To use hardware description languages a strong background in electronics is often necessary, as multiple processors are typically working at the same time.

C++ is considered a foundational programming language for robotics due it being low-level and able to directly manipulate robot hardware. Python is also an effective robotic programming language due to its ease of use, versatility and wide range of libraries.

Every industrial robot manufacturer has its own programming language and robot programming software. This is very restrictive as it means that you need to learn a completely new programming method every time you want to use a new type of robot.

With conventional robot programming methods, this means testing the program out on the physical robot. This often means that the robot is out of action for long periods of time, which impacts its productivity.

With offline programming, you can do most of your debugging on the simulated robot. You only download the program to the physical robot when you know it runs smoothly. This is one of the various ways that offline programming can save you time.

Unfortunately, you will never get a simple answer if you ask "What's the best programming language for robotics?" to a whole roomful of robotics professionals (or on forums like Stack Overflow, Quora, Trossen, Reddit or Research Gate).

But, it is also a pretty useless answer for the new roboticist who is trying to decide which language to learn first. You're probably reading this article because you want to start programming robots and don't know which language to choose.

If you're only using a single robot for your business, the best language to learn is the one that will get you up and running as soon as possible. In this case, you might not even need to learn a programming language. For example, with hand guiding technology you can move a collaborative robot around manually. No text-based programming required.

The most important thing for career roboticists is to develop "The Programming Mindset" rather than to be proficient in one specific language, as I explained in the article about essential robotic skills.

In many ways, it doesn't really matter which programming language you learn first. Each language that you learn develops your proficiency with the programming mindset and makes it easier to learn any new language whenever it's required.

For this updated version of the article, I've brought in some more objective data about the most popular programming languages among engineers and the most common programming languages at the time of writing. I've also researched the newer languages that have been popping up since the first version of this article.

Pascal was one of the first programming languages that I ever learned. However, that's not why I've included it here. It is the basis for several of the industrial robot languages (see number 8 below). As a result, it's still quite a good starting point if you are going to be programming industrial robots.

These days, Pascal is too outdated to be good for everyday use. However, it can be useful if you want to become familiar with other industrial robot languages without becoming tied to one particular robot brand.

Scratch programming is achieved by dragging around blocks and connecting them together. "Under the hood" it is written in a combination of Squeak (a dialect of Smalltalk), ActionScript and Javascript.

Although you're probably not going to write any industrial robot programs in Scratch, it's an incredibly good and popular language for complete beginners and is paving the way for many of our future robotics engineers.

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

ABB has its RAPID programming language. Kuka has KRL (Kuka Robot Language). Comau uses PDL2, Yaskawa uses INFORM and Kawasaki uses AS. Then, Fanuc robots use Karel, Stubli robots use VAL3 and Universal Robots use URScript.

In recent years, more general-purpose programming options like ROS Industrial, manufacturer agnostic offline programming, and hand guiding have started to provide more standardized options for programmers. However, if you are a technician, you are still more likely to have to use the manufacturer's language.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has really been gaining in popularity recently. This means that AI programming languages like LISP and Prolog are starting to make their way back into people's programming toolkits.

LISP is the world's second oldest programming language (FORTRAN is older, but only by one year). Parts of ROS (the Robot Operating System) are written in LISP, although you don't need to know it to use ROS.

It is also possible to program artificial intelligence using some of the other languages on this list and more that are not listed. However, LISP and Prolog remain at the core of some AI implementations and certainly deserve their place on this list. It's also worth remembering that robotics and AI are not the same thing.

HDLs are commonly used to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These devices allow you to develop electronic hardware without having to actually produce a silicon chip, which makes them a quicker and easier option for some development tasks.

If you don't create prototypes of robotic electronics in your job, you may never use HDLs. Even so, it is important to know that they exist as they are quite different from other programming languages. For one thing, all operations are carried out in parallel, rather than sequentially as with processor-based languages.

MATLAB (and its open-source relatives like Octave) is very popular with some robotic engineers for analyzing data and developing control systems. It is used extensively in research and data processing. It's also used extensively in some university courses.

For robotics, there is also a very popular Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB. I know people who have developed entire robotics systems using MATLAB alone. If you want to analyze data, produce advanced graphs or implement control systems, you will probably want to learn MATLAB.

Like C# and MATLAB, Java is an interpretive language, which means that it is not compiled into machine code. Rather, the Java Virtual Machine interprets the instructions at runtime, allowing you to use the same code on many different machines.

The prime focus of the language is ease-of-use. Many people agree that it achieves this very well. Python dispenses with a lot of the usual things which take up time in programming, such as defining and casting variable types. Like Java, it is an interpreted language.

There are also a huge number of free libraries for Python which means you don't have to "reinvent the wheel" when you need to implement some basic functionality. And since it allows simple bindings with C/C++ code, the performance-heavy parts of the code can be implemented in these languages to avoid performance loss.

Many people agree that C and C++ are required languages in robotics. Why? Because a lot of hardware libraries used in robotics use one of these languages. These libraries allow interaction with low-level hardware, allow for real-time performance and are very mature programming languages. These days, you'll probably use C++ more than C, although C remains one of the most efficient programming languages available.

C/C++ are not as simple to use as, say, Python or MATLAB. It can take quite a lot longer to implement the same functionality using C and it will require many more lines of code. However, as robotics is very dependent on real-time performance, C and C++ are probably the closest thing that we roboticists have to "a standard language". This is true even despite the growing popularity of Python.

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