Scalable Visual Representation of Sensor-Based, Nested Robot Programs

An easy to understand graphical representation for nested robot programs is important to allow also non-experts, who are usually unable to read source code, to understand, what a robot program is meant to do. In this paper we present a Backus-Naur form for describing sensor-based nested robot programs with a corresponding visual representation of these robot programs in the form of control flow along a timeline. To achieve this, we utilize a scalable layered representation to visualize the components of the Backus-Naur form. In addition to that, we add temporal information to the visual representation, so that the users are able to see the execution time of different parts of the program and of the program as a whole. The result of this work are two equivalent, equally powerful representations of robot programs, namely the textual representation in form of the Backus-Naur form and the scalable layered visual representation. Both can be converted into each other without loss. The evaluation shows, that the visual representation is easy to understand for non-experts and therefore suitable to use within the context of intuitive robot programming.