[Engineering Paper] An IDE for Easy Programming of Simple Robotics Tasks

Many robotic tasks in small manufacturing sites are quite simple. For example, a pick and place task requires only a few common commands. Unfortunately, the standard languages and programming environments for industrial robots are complex, making even these simple tasks nearly impossible for novices. To enable novices to program simple tasks we created a block-based programming language and environment focused on usability, learnability, and understandability and embedded its programming environment in a state-of-the-art robot simulator. By using this high-fidelity prototype over the course of a year in a case study, a user study, and for countless demonstrations we have gained many concrete insights. In this paper we discuss the details of the language, the design of its programming environment, and concrete insights gained via longitudinal usage.