Democratizing robot interaction with functional blocks From website. Erle Robotics services Programming a robot is no easy task. While tools like the simplified a lot this process, ROS still takes about 3 weeks on average to a PhD student. Robot Operating System (ROS) learning While for a , many people without coding background will in the future desire to interact/operate robots. To simplify the process of programming a robot and to open up robotics to a wider audience our team is happy to unveil , a ROS package for robots with Google’s library. professional roboticist ROS is a must robot_blockly programming blockly Motivation Mitch Resnick, one of the persons behind Scratch points out something interesting: We shouldn’t think about young people as digital natives He claims that . It’s not that hard to justify this claim and you can probably come up with a few examples, here’s the one that I happen to see the most: young people has a lot experience at interacting with new technologies but lot less when creating and expressing themselves with new technologies Can we really consider this as being a ?. Mitch disagrees: digital native … it’s almost as if they could read but not write And indeed it feels like that. Can these individuals create things based on knowing how to use a variety of modern devices (potentially, including robots?)?. They indeed bring up new ideas and approaches but . creating technology that has a wide impact requires literacy. Specially in robotics The third language Modern schools tend to teach kids two additional languages. Typically youngsters, get exposed to English, Spanish, French, German, etc. There’s a big debate regarding the benefits that learning foreign languages bring leaving (I actually learned quite a few while studying abroad) but leaving that aside isn’t it more useful to have them learn a programming language instead? How about C or Python are widely used no matter where you are? Many countries are acknowledging this fact and are starting to from an early stage. teach how to code A block-based approach for programming robots: robot_blockly As pointed out before, in robotics, coding is like writing. in other words, . We could indeed focus on teaching the new generations programming but how about making it easier for the existing ones?. That’s exactly what our time has been up to with our work on robot_blockly. literacy for a roboticists requires to know how to code Here’s how programming a robot looks like with robot_blockly: Just drag and drop blocks to put together behaviors in your browser. puts together the best of the two worlds: the flexibility and power of ROS together with the simplicity of the block programming trend that Mitch and his team started with Scratch. robot_blockly Wonder what you can do with robot_blockly, have a look the following examples: Examples The robot_blockly ROS package is open source and released under a GPLv3 license. You can fork the code and modify it to your needs. In addition, if you happen to be a robot manufacturer that wants it done for you and request a customization. reach us out robot_blockly will be presented and discussed by Erle Robotics next 8th and 9th of October at Seoul, South Korea during ROSCon 2016 . If you happen to be around, come and talk to us!
