English

On reverse-engineering the KUKA Robot Language

Robotics 2010-09-28 v1

Abstract

Most commercial manufacturers of industrial robots require their robots to be programmed in a proprietary language tailored to the domain - a typical domain-specific language (DSL). However, these languages oftentimes suffer from shortcomings such as controller-specific design, limited expressiveness and a lack of extensibility. For that reason, we developed the extensible Robotics API for programming industrial robots on top of a general-purpose language. Although being a very flexible approach to programming industrial robots, a fully-fledged language can be too complex for simple tasks. Additionally, legacy support for code written in the original DSL has to be maintained. For these reasons, we present a lightweight implementation of a typical robotic DSL, the KUKA Robot Language (KRL), on top of our Robotics API. This work deals with the challenges in reverse-engineering the language and mapping its specifics to the Robotics API. We introduce two different approaches of interpreting and executing KRL programs: tree-based and bytecode-based interpretation.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1009.5004,
  title  = {On reverse-engineering the KUKA Robot Language},
  author = {Henrik Mühe and Andreas Angerer and Alwin Hoffmann and Wolfgang Reif},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1009.5004},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

1st International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and models for ROBotic systems

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:18:57.790Z