[Engineering Paper] An IDE for Easy Programming of Simple Robotics Tasks

Shepherd, David; Francis, Patrick; Weintrop, David; Franklin, Diana; Li, Boyang; Afzal, Afsoon

doi:10.1109/scam.2018.00032

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…NaoBlocks [143] Blockly Manipulate Nao robots. Coblox [136] Blockly Programming ABB's industrial robots. ROS educational 4 [147] Snap!…”

Section: Name Metatool Topicmentioning

confidence: 99%

DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

Merino,

Vinju,

Brand

2021

Preprint

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Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors (jigsaw-like puzzles) to display valid combinations of language constructs to the users. Part of the current popularity of block-based environments is thanks to Scratch.As a result they are often associated with tools for children or young learners. However, it is unclear how these types of programming environments are developed and used in general. So we conducted a systematic literature review on block-based environments by studying 152 papers published between 2014 and 2020, and a non-systematic tool review of 32 block-based environments. In particular, we provide a helpful inventory of block-based editors for end-users on different topics and domains. Likewise, we focused on identifying the main components of block-based environments, how they are engineered, and how they are used. This survey should be equally helpful for language engineering researchers and language engineers alike. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; • Software and its engineering → Graphical user interface languages; Visual languages; Integrated and visual development environments.

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“…NaoBlocks [143] Blockly Manipulate Nao robots. Coblox [136] Blockly Programming ABB's industrial robots. ROS educational 4 [147] Snap!…”

Section: Name Metatool Topicmentioning

confidence: 99%

DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

Merino,

Vinju,

Brand

2021

Preprint

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“…The block-based IDE is a CoBlox derivate. CoBlox is designed for offline robot programming and normally features a robot and environment simulation ( [26], [22], [27]). However, in contrast to the simulation, in this paper, a real robot was used.…”

Section: Augmented Reality-assisted Robot Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simplifying Robot Programming using Augmented Reality and End-User Development

Yigitbas¹,

Jovanovikj²,

Engels³

2021

Preprint

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Robots are widespread across diverse application contexts. Teaching robots to perform tasks, in their respective contexts, demands a high domain and programming expertise. However, robot programming faces high entry barriers due to the complexity of robot programming itself. Even for experts robot programming is a cumbersome and errorprone task where faulty robot programs can be created, causing damage when being executed on a real robot. To simplify the process of robot programming, we combine Augmented Reality (AR) with principles of end-user development. By combining them, the real environment is extended with useful virtual artifacts that can enable experts as well as non-professionals to perform complex robot programming tasks. Therefore, Simple Programming Environment in Augmented Reality with Enhanced Debugging (SPEARED) was developed as a prototype for an AR-assisted robot programming environment. SPEARED makes use of AR to project a robot as well as a programming environment onto the target working space. To evaluate our approach, expert interviews with domain experts from the area of industrial automation, robotics, and AR were performed. The experts agreed that SPEARED has the potential to enrich and ease current robot programming processes.

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“…W E study concurrent robot behaviors encoded as Behavior Trees (BTs) [1]. Robotics applications of BTs span from manipulation [2]- [4] to non-expert programming [5]- [7]. Other works include task planning [8], human-robot interaction [9]- [11], learning [12]- [15], UAV [16]- [21], multi-robot systems [22]- [25], and system analysis [26]- [28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Handling Concurrency in Behavior Trees

Colledanchise,

Natale

2021

Preprint

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This paper addresses the concurrency issues affecting Behavior Trees (BTs), a popular tool to model the behaviors of autonomous agents in the video game and the robotics industry.BT designers can easily build complex behaviors composing simpler ones, which represents a key advantage of BTs. The parallel composition of BTs expresses a way to combine concurrent behaviors that has high potential, since composing pre-existing BTs in parallel results easier than composing in parallel classical control architectures, as finite state machines or teleo-reactive programs. However, BT designers rarely use such composition due to the underlying concurrency problems similar to the ones faced in concurrent programming. As a result, the parallel composition, despite its potential, finds application only in the composition of simple behaviors or where the designer can guarantee the absence of conflicts by design.In this paper, we define two new BT nodes to tackle the concurrency problems in BTs and we show how to exploit them to create predictable behaviors. In addition, we introduce measures to assess execution performance and show how different design choices affect them. We validate our approach in both simulations and the real world. Simulated experiments provide statisticallysignificant data, whereas real-world experiments show the applicability of our method on real robots. We provide an opensource implementation of the novel BT formulation and published all the source code to reproduce the numerical examples and experiments.

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[Engineering Paper] An IDE for Easy Programming of Simple Robotics Tasks

Cited by 12 publications

References 4 publications

DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

Simplifying Robot Programming using Augmented Reality and End-User Development

Handling Concurrency in Behavior Trees

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