Task-oriented programming for industry: a comparison with robot-oriented programming

The ease of use of robot programming interfaces represents a barrier to robot adoption in several manufacturing sectors because of the lack of expertise of the end-users. Current robot programming methods are mostly the past heritage, with robot programmers reluctant to adopt new programming paradigms. This work aims to evaluate the impact on non-expert users of introducing a new task-oriented programming interface that hides the complexity of a programming framework based on ROS. The paper compares the programming performance of such an interface with a classic robot-oriented programming method based on a state-of-the-art robot teach pendant. An experimental campaign involved 22 non-expert users working on the programming of two industrial tasks demonstrating a high acceptance level of the task-oriented interface with not significant difference in the learning time compared to a standard interface.