Robot software

Robot software is the set of coded commands or instructions that tell a mechanical device and electronic system, known together as a robot, what tasks to perform. Robot software is used to perform autonomous tasks. Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.

Some robot software aims at developing intelligent mechanical devices. Common tasks include feedback loops, control, pathfinding, data filtering, locating and sharing data.

While it is a specific type of software, it is still quite diverse. Each manufacturer has their own robot software. While the vast majority of software is about manipulation of data and seeing the result on-screen, robot software is for the manipulation of objects or tools in the real world.

Software for industrial robots consists of data objects and lists of instructions, known as program flow (list of instructions). For example,

Go to Jig1

is an instruction to the robot to go to positional data named Jig1. Of course programs can also contain implicit data for example

Tell axis 1 move 30 degrees.

Data and program usually reside in separate sections of the robot controller memory. One can change the data without changing the program and vice versa. For example, one can write a different program using the same Jig1 or one can adjust the position of Jig1 without changing the programs that use it.

Due to the highly proprietary nature of robot software, most manufacturers of robot hardware also provide their own software. While this is not unusual in other automated control systems, the lack of standardization of programming methods for robots does pose certain challenges. For example, there are over 30 different manufacturers of industrial robots, so there are also 30 different robot programming languages required. Fortunately, there are enough similarities between the different robots that it is possible to gain a broad-based understanding of robot programming without having to learn each manufacturer's proprietary language.

...
Wikipedia