Visual programming for robot control

The primary advantage of visual programming languages is that they directly represent the structure of algorithms and data, thereby enhancing the programmer's ability to build and comprehend programs. If the programming domain consists of physical objects with observable behaviour, such as a robot and its environment, then incorporating the obvious visual representations of these objects directly into the programming process may further increase the programmer's effectiveness and accuracy. We propose a robot programming system consisting of two parts; a definition module with which to describe the structure, function and visual representation of a specific robot, and a programming module that uses this description to enable programming by direct manipulation. We describe the visual editors that constitute the first of these modules, discuss the underlying structure generated by it, and briefly show how this structure can be used in the second module.