Abstract: An industrial robot has a control system with a program memory. During programming, the robot is manually controlled to a sequence of desired positions. At each position, an operating member may be activated to store into the program memory an instruction containing both information about the robot position and information about robot operation at that position.Suitably information about robot operation is entered in the form of identification of a sub-program containing a set or sequence of control signals which have been stored in advance. The sub-program is suitably identified by a number fetched from a buffer memory. For each of the instructions, during the execution of the main program, on the one hand the positioning of the robot is executed and, on the other hand, the sub-program is called and executed.