ROS Based Visual Programming Tool for Mobile Robot Education and Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a web-based visual programming tool compatible with ROS, designed to facilitate educational and practical robot applications by simplifying coding and reducing errors for users, especially beginners.

Contribution

Development of a ROS-compatible web-based visual programming system using Blockly, enabling easy robot application creation and communication with ROS for educational purposes.

Findings

Supports teleoperation, SLAM, and wandering applications

Simplifies coding process for beginners in robotics

Facilitates communication between web interface and ROS

Abstract

Visual programming languages (VPLs) provide coding without typing texts. VPL makes coding easy to programmers with automatically adding usually used some code structure. Beginners in coding have generally two main challenges; transforming ideas into logical expressions and syntax errors. Syntax errors are impossible with VPLs because of there is no forgotten parentheses and semicolons. VPLs provide to focus on algorithm for programmers. VPL is a new trend for educational robotic environments. In this study, Robot Operating System (ROS) compatible web based visual programming system has been developed for evarobot. ROS provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. Blockly has been used as VPL for the study and to generate / use blocks (commucation, sensing etc.). Some applications were generated like teleoperation, SLAM and wander etc. In this system, communication between server and client is supported by rosbridge package. Web page connected to ROS which runs on server using roslibjs library. Rosbridge provides a JSON API to ROS functionality for non-ROS programs.