Posts by IsaacMaw1

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful responses. It's great to hear from people actually working in the industry, as a journalist I speak a lot with sales engineers for the big vendors/OEMs, and they don't have the same insight....

Quote from Lemster68

Which do you think is the higher level proprietary one? The super polished drag and drop type interface? Or languages Like Karel and Rapid?

To clarify, I meant "higher level" in the sense of "further removed from binary". For example a language like Python is abstracted from machine code to provide features and be easier for people to read/write, while Assembly for example allows for operations that are "closer" to the actual hardware instructions.

Skyefire pointed out above that robot languages have evolved separately from computer software languages, so I don't know if this is the correct usage. But in short I would think that the more "user friendly" an interface is, the more translation the computer/PLC is doing to get it down to the binary instructions that the controller actually follows.

Thanks Skyefire, this is very interesting. I don't recall if we covered Sunrise OS in my KUKA programming course, or if I was so limited in my programming skills that they could have put anything in front of me and I would have thought it looked like Java, haha.

It makes sense that robot programming is different to computer programming due to the motions. I think Unimate was lead-to-teach, for example.

In general, how transferable do you think robot programming experience is between brands? I assume that things like planning a process, identifying bottlenecks, understanding safety, maintenance and troubleshooting are more valuable, and the new language is somewhat trivial. Do you agree?

Hello,

I am a freelance journalist working on an article for engineering.com. I am investigating whether robot programmers today think that proprietary programming languages put forth by OEMs are becoming more user friendly, and as a result robot programming requires less knowledge of programming fundamentals. For example, when I learned how to program KUKA robots in 2017, the language was very similar to Java. So, in addition to learning to program that KUKA robot, I was also learning some transferable skills in my career. However, if the programming for my robot is a super polished user interface and I never see the code, I don't really learn any programming skills.

Do you agree or disagree? I would really like to hear the thoughts this community has.