Modeling Techniques of Robotic Programming

The use of an adequate modeling technique will facilitate the programming system development, enabling the system developers and the system clients to express their ideas, allowing their communication in a known way. The modeling advantage is the creation of models from the system and its behavior that can be seen in different abstraction levels, before implementing it. So, it is very important to model the system.

If the programs are created directly, thinking on the problem and on the machine, this programs would be difficulty to read, to write, and consequently, to maintain. So, some techniques were created, like the structure analysis, that was the first modeling technique, where the problem is decomposed based on the data and the operations, that should be modeled separately. It is used the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) to model the data, and to model the operations it is used the Data Flow Diagram (DFD). Recently, there are some others modeling techniques, like Unified Modeling Language (UML), used to model object orienting systems. It is used the Class Diagram, that shows the classes and their relationships in a logical view (like ERD to structure analysis); the State Transition Diagram, that shows the events that causes transition from one state to an- other, with its resulting actions (like DFD to structure analysis); and the Use-Cases Diagram, that shows the system’s use cases and the actors that interact to them.

The robot programming has its modeling techniques. One modeling technique used in the development of mobile robots, the Subsumption Architecture, was used to model a manufacturing cell, composed by two robots and some others components. The subsumption architecture was the first behavior based modeling technique and, even it had been created to develop mobile robots, they can be used, as a high level abstraction, to model industrial applications. The analyst should choose the most adequate for such problem among various modeling techniques, to obtain the advantages of the software engineering.