The Robotics API: An object-oriented framework for modeling industrial robotics applications

During the last two decades, software development has evolved continuously into an engineering discipline with systematic use of methods and tools to model and implement software. For example, object-oriented analysis and design is structuring software models according to real-life objects of the problem domain and their relations. However, the industrial robotics domain is still dominated by old-style, imperative robot programming languages, making software development difficult and expensive. For this reason, we introduce the object-oriented Robotics Application Programming Interface (Robotics API) for developing software for industrial robotic applications. The Robotics API offers an abstract, extensible domain model and provides common functionality, which can be easily used by application developers. The advantages of the Robotics API are illustrated with an application example.