Novice-Friendly Multi-Armed Robotics Programming

Abstract

Collaborative robots are being applied in a growing number of usage scenarios, but their adoption is slowed down by the high complexity of robot programming. As previous prototype studies have shown, block-based programming environments can enable novice or end users to program industrial single-armed robots. Some existing block-based tools support parallel programming and therefore show potential to be used for multi-armed robot programming as well. We analyze their designs and argue how improved abstractions and visualizations could make multi-armed parallelism accessible to novice users. Based on this analysis, we then extract a list of features that a block-based environment designed for multi-armed robot programming should provide. Finally, we present our design vision for a novel programming environment for two-armed robots, show how it provides these features and discuss how it can enable both novices and experienced intermediate users to perform parallelized programming tasks.