Announcing robot_blocky, a web-based block programming tools for ROS and Dronecode robots

From the ROS blog, a post by the Erle Robotics team announcing a simple programming toolkit for ROS and Dronecode-based robots.

For the last months we provided several training sessions on how to use our brains and robots based in ROS. While doing so we noticed that many people struggled at understanding ROS so we started exploring a way to make this process easier.

We prototyped different concepts and decided that ideally wanted to reach high schools students. At this point we removed the assumption of "coding skills" from the equation which made us look into systems like Scratch for robot programming. After taking inspiration from previous work we are happy to present robot_blocky: a multiplatform, web-based tool for programming robots and drones that use ROS.

Here's a short clip that introduces robot_blocky: Previously called ROSimple

We like to think of robot_blocky as a simple way to program robots using ROS. Code is available at https://github.com/erlerobot/robot_blocky and there's a first iteration of documentation at http://wiki.ros.org/blocky

Thanks Chris for sharing this. Our team has made several improvements over the last days so this post actually makes good sense to me. Among them:

the package has been renamed to "robot_blockly" following the ROS conventions
submodules have been directly integrated within the code which makes it easier to follow up and stay up to date with the changes
APM Rover tests have finished successfully and we now have an APM vehicle controlled with simple blocks (video will come out soon). Accuracy and flexibility of the blocks is something we need to work on but the concept is promising.

There's been good feedback on this initiative and that'll motivate some more changes in the code to make this ROS package easier to adopt.

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Comments

Víctor Mayoral December 13, 2015 at 3:43am

Hi Linus, both documentation links work to me https://github.com/erlerobot/robot_blockly#documentation.

erlerobot/robot_blockly

A simple way to program ROS robots using blockly. - erlerobot/robot_blockly
Developer

Linus December 12, 2015 at 11:12pm

Great stuff, should be good to fill some of these long winter nights.

The documentation seems to be non existent yet or it the wrong link.
Víctor Mayoral December 12, 2015 at 4:32pm
Thanks Chris for sharing this. Our team has made several improvements over the last days so this post actually makes good sense to me. Among them:
- the package has been renamed to "robot_blockly" following the ROS conventions
- submodules have been directly integrated within the code which makes it easier to follow up and stay up to date with the changes
- APM Rover tests have finished successfully and we now have an APM vehicle controlled with simple blocks (video will come out soon). Accuracy and flexibility of the blocks is something we need to work on but the concept is promising.
There's been good feedback on this initiative and that'll motivate some more changes in the code to make this ROS package easier to adopt.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson December 12, 2015 at 3:56pm

Yes, but I think this is an updated post with a new video and name.
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 12, 2015 at 3:51pm

Hi Chris,

I believe that there was a previous robot_blocky blog post here.

Regards,

TCIII AVD

This reply was deleted.