Announcing robot_blockly, a web-based block programming tools for ROS 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_blockly and there's a first iteration of documentation at http://wiki.ros.org/blockly