Testing

  1. Testing FANUC TP Programs with Ruby

    I’ve written about testing before, but I still can’t get over the fact that the state of the art method for testing multi-million dollar industrial robot cells is trial and error. That’s why I’ve started working on an environment for reliably testing FANUC TP code. I’ve basically written a Ruby gem to correctly parse, interpret and execute TP programs within a simulated runtime. With this environment I can use any of Ruby’s great testing tools to make sure the robot does what it’s supposed to do.

  2. Introducing KUnit: a simple unit testing framework for FANUC's KAREL programming language

    I’m happy to share a real open source project that I’ve been working on: KUnit. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/onerobotics/KUnit. Coming from a Ruby background where automated unit testing is common-practice, it’s frustrating to come work on a robot where tools for automated testing don’t exist. No matter how careful I am when making changes to my code, I always feel a little bit exposed without a comprehensive set of unit tests making sure I didn’t break something.

  3. Testing FANUC TP and KAREL Code

    UPDATE 2014/02/27: If you’re looking for a how-to guide on FANUC KAREL programming, you’re probably better off reading my Introduction to KAREL Programming article. One of the things I love about the Ruby community is its dedication and support for testing. Having very little formal computer science education, concepts like unit testing and integration testing were completely foreign to me. After first ignoring everyone’s advice to test now and test often, I eventually forced myself to learn out of necessity and now advocate the practice to anyone who will listen.