How do they program robots?

Question

What language is used to program robots?
(From Mechanical Movements to sensors)

Answer 1

Electronic engineers will give a different answer from industrial robotic technicians. Computer vision programmers will give a different answer than cognitive roboticists. And everyone would disagree as to what is "the best programming language”. In the end, the answer which most people would all agree with is "it depends." This is a pretty useless answer for the new roboticist who is trying to decide which language to learn first. Even if this is the most realistic answer, because it does depend on what type of application you want to develop and what system you are using.

Top 10 Popular Programming Languages in Robotics

10. BASIC / Pascal
9. Industrial Robot Languages:
ABB has its RAPID programming language. Kuka has KRL (Kuka Robot Language). Comau uses PDL2, Yaskawa uses INFORM and Kawasaki uses AS. Then, Fanuc robots use Karel, Stäubli robots use VAL3 and Universal Robots use URScript.
8. LISP
7. Hardware Description Languages (HDLs)
6. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
5. Assembly
4. MATLAB
3. C#/.NET
2. Java
1. Python

&

C/C++

Finally, we reach the Number 1 programming language in robotics! Many people agree that C and C++ are a good starting point for new roboticists. Why? Because a lot of hardware libraries use these languages. They allow interaction with low level hardware, allow for real time performance and are very mature programming languages. These days, you'll probably use C++ more than C, because the language has much more functionality. C++ is basically an extension of C. It can be useful to learn at least a little bit of C first, so that you can recognize it when you find a hardware library written in C. C/C++ are not as simple to use as, say, Python or MATLAB. It can take quite a lot longer to implement the same functionality using C and it will require many more lines of code. However, as robotics is very dependent on real time performance, C and C++ are probably the closest thing that we roboticists have to "a standard language".