ABSTRACT
The purpose of a programming system is to generate a robot control program in a user-friendly way. Compared with the programming of other numerically controlled machines, robot programming has some peculiarities: Robot programming is concerned with the generation of very complex motions. This chapter is concerned with textual programming techniques. It gives a general introduction into this area and a detailed treatment of the subject, using the structured robot language programming system as an example. Programs written with one particular programming system could be used to control robots of different types. Industrial robots are being applied more and more in the areas of assembly operations and for complex handling tasks. The most important element of off-line programming is a language that enables a description of the problem to be solved. The principal tasks of a compiler are to check the syntactic and semantic correctness of programs and to generate an executable machine code.
