A Visual Programming Approach For Co-Designed Robots

This paper proposes an approach for the high-level programming of co-designed robots that reduces programming complexity. Particularly, the work presented focuses on the programming framework of an intelligent system, based on the IEEE Standard Ontologies for Robotics and Automation, which allows users the automatic design of robots and the automatic implementation of controllers in the Robot Operating System (ROS). In our approach, the co-designed robot functionalities are automatically translated into visual programming blocks allowing non-expert users an easy robot programming by means of a visual programming language. Several robot configurations and three case studies are provided as a proof of concept. The validation, in terms of usability, of the framework has been carried out with inexperienced users showing promising results.